Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Of what very few details the article outlines, they just go on about nifty hardware. Have we not learned by now that cool hardware still sucks when hamstrung by crappy software? (A Samsung logo popped in my head while writing that, don't know why.) Now, Google is no Samsung, but they're a long way from Apple or even Microsoft on the UX front.
(EDIT: the Pixel phones could be all that, but I wouldn't know it because I'm currently content with iPhones and have paid no attention to Pixel. Point is, this article does nothing to relieve my ignorance, which is why I clicked on the thing to begin with.)
PS Plus, it's Bloomberg. Not really expecting much in the way of technical details from them.
Not sure I agree with this. I've been on android for a while, so I'm sure I'm biased, but stock AOSP Android is pretty much perfect for me. Very minimal and aesthetically beautiful, but still powerful and customizable.
Just got the moto g4 and for under $250. I have a really good looking color customized phone with stock android, that feels good in the hand, unlocked that I can take to any carrier. That is a killer.
You can get AOSP on a lot of phones, you just have to be comfortable flashing a custom ROM.
I don't understand why anyone would pay iPhone prices for an Android phone. Even if the hardware quality is similar (which it won't be, because Apple SoCs are at least a generation ahead of everyone else) Android app quality is much worse.
I'm saying this as someone who has only ever used Android.
I just can't see the justification to spending this much money on a phone Google will drop support for after 2 years, in addition to never fixing some issues that are present at launch (look up the Nexus 4 camera reset issue, which Google never fixed).
I'm using a Xiaomi Redmi 2 I picked up new from AliExpress for $125 USD with free shipping to Europe, and I'm running Marshmallow via CM. Works perfectly, in fact most of the time it's better than $300-400 phones thanks to not being loaded to the gills with Google Apps crapware (seriously I have no use for Google Play Music, Books, News, etc)
Edit: for people down voting this, could you explain why? I've left my opinion here and if you disagree with it, I'd love to hear why. I don't believe I've stated anything factually incorrect.
Can anyone confirm if this is true? I thought the general advantage for i[a-zA-Z0-9]\+ is a well defined small N number of targets, which allow great optimization. Generally, the parts on apple things are a bit older than the competition but they pull off more (at least in user's eyes) compared with Android due to that optimization.
But just look at the benchmarks. Apple SoCs slaughter Qualcomm and Samsung chips in mobile benchmarks.
Yes, they're highly optimised for their workload, but the point is that Apple is much better at doing this than everyone else making mobile SoCs.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9837/snapdragon-820-preview/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i....
Heck, in many cases the A9 leaves the Snapdragon 820 behind, and that hasn't even shipped in a Nexus phone yet (the Pixel will probably have the 821).
I think the real reason is some combination of (a) ARM isn't competitive (or only recently became competitive) at the high power/high performance point that Intel CPUs excel at; (b) the Mac line generates so much less revenue and operates at so much smaller of a scale than iOS devices that it isn't worth developing CPUs in-house for them, not to mention the fixed costs associated with undergoing a transition.
Apple could just drop new Intel chips into their existing MacBooks as they get released, and easily be getting improved speed + efficiency each year. The new Kaby Lake chips even do hardware 4K video and VP9. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/intel-unveils-kaby-la...
sigh
Dumping Intel chips would take a ton of effort and resources, in an area where Apple isn't interested in making an effort or investing resources.
http://macdailynews.com/2016/09/30/macos-sierra-code-suggest...
Measuring browser performance is hard because there's a lot of different functionality but notice how routinely we see reviews where the device the Android flagship phones are trying to beat is the iPhone 6 or even 2013's 5S:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/iPhon... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/iPhon...
(from https://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/09/iphone-7-and-7-plus-re...)
Some of that reflects the considerable amount of work which Apple has put into Mobile Safari but a lot of that is going to come down to single thread performance.
This is an empty statement backed by no data. The only evidence you provide to the superiority of single core perf is browser performance. Except,
1) browser usage is now a mostly insignificant part of time spent on mobile (http://flurrymobile.tumblr.com/post/127638842745/seven-years... )
and
2) The bottleneck in mobile apps which depend on the network (including browsing the web) is rarely the CPU, it's the network.
The other side of this is that we're not really talking about which app has the most time in the foreground so much as which app causes the user to wait the most. Much of that time will be network I/O which is a real challenge but also not relevant to this discussion about CPU performance.
Fundamentally, all I'm trying to say is that Amdahl's law still applies until we're at the point where the user is never waiting on computation. Developers have been getting better at multithreading but uneven CPU usage is still common enough that I'd favor fewer faster cores over more slower cores.
> the parts on apple things are a bit older than the competition
Not sure where you got that impression, maybe you're thinking about Apple's laptops? Apple get the best and the latest from TSMC, which at the moment is 16nm finfet and next year expected to be 10nm finfet. Intel is the only company with a better process, and they don't make smartphone SoCs. And Apple has hired all the best Austin-based talent for their design team, poaching AMD and others heavily.
That may be my mistake. Thanks for the links and information.
I am not in the US, so I don't know, sorry.
I have the 2014813 model, which supports the same LTE bands used in Europe. I also had 4G service in Japan, Korea, and China on a recent trip to Asia.
Overall I would definitely recommend the phone as a solid mid-range handset. The only thing that sometimes annoys me is lack of 5GHz WiFi.
That being said, it takes about 5 minutes to flash a custom recovery and the latest CM, so in the end it's a non-issue.
2) Some Xiaomi phones do not even come with unlocked LTE bands, depending on your region; try to confirm what bands are available before you buy.
Where are you basing this on? Out of some social media apps (Facebook and Snapchat) I have found that Android apps are on-par with their iOS counterparts.
Android apps are neglected next to ios. Examples:
* spotify is shit on android. They broke audio playback during system announcements (like google maps directions) and just didn't give a damn for two months. It's not like anybody uses spotify and maps in a car or anything.
* most bank apps on android still don't take advantage of fingerprint auth to avoid typing long bank passwords. Four word passwords with punctuation are super fun to type on mobile.
* fitbit: Until about 6 months ago, pushing back from various subscreens would take you out of the app instead of navigating back to the main screen. There's clearly no-one who matters at fitbit that cares about android. It also doesn't particularly reliably connect to the device. Graphs and data desync from each other. I have not seen this on ios.
* there really isn't any reader on android as nice as GoodReader
* games come second, if ever -- eg kingdom rush frontiers
Any particular lacunae in Adobe's Reader?
* a full file manager, with folders;
* various ways to get files on and off: a built in web server to upload files, good dropbox integration;
* the ability to crop pdf pages to just the text to get rid of margins so your ipad isn't displaying an inch of whitespace next to the text. Also the ability to set different crop sizes/locations for even and odd pages.
* bookmarks, plus the ability to email them to yourself
* tabbed files, including the ability to open a single file more than once so you can easily switch back and forth between different locations
I haven't kept up with Adobe's Reader, but it has 3 stars while goodreader costs more and continues to get glowing reviews.
My primary device is an iPhone 6 Plus, and I have to say, Nexus 6 and Android N is really impressive from both a hardware and software perspective.
That being, I wish Google decoupled device drivers from the Android image.
If they adopted the Windows on PC device driver model, it would be so great for users, especially those with older and less supported phones.
Ideally, Android (or their patched version of the Linux kernel) would expose an API for each different kind of device. An general API for cameras, an API for audio, etc. The manufacturers would then write device drivers that implement / fulfill the functionality of these open/generic APIs. (This is how things are done on PCs.)
Some phones have two CPUs or SoCs, one being energy-efficient and the other highly-performant, and the system switches between them based on the workload. But an update of the OS could simply add & expose an additional new API for dual-SoC systems.
Decoupling device drivers and OS releases would be a huge win for everyone. We'd get the security update swith newer OSes, and even driver updates would be simpler.
PC peripheral manufacturers often release updates to their device drivers, and for a Linux and Windows users its relatively straightforward to update a device driver. E.g., I just updated my Nvidia graphics driver on Linux to the latest version two days ago. I have several kernel modules installed, and apt-get handled everything seamlessly, and built a new kernel image in a jiffy.
How often do you see device drivers updated on Android? Especially if there's a bug, how long before it's fixed? All of the drivers on Android are baked into this giant system image, and the system image contains so many disparate components, that shouldn't all be locked together. The Android system image release process is so broken. The Google -> Manufacturer -> Carrier approval & release is slow and dysfunctional.
The best way to go would be to adopt standard Linux distro practices, use a good package manager (like NixOS) that'll manage and assemble all the disparate system components, instead of shipping one giant frozen-in-time system image.
This is not a full picture how things work on PCs. There are also dependencies - i.e. you cannot power down the bus, while the device on the other end is not powered down. Things get more interesting, when you have SoC that implements multiple functions and there are interdependecies, where you would not expect them. The entire problem with Skylake mobile chips is, that nobody knows how to properly change the power states and Intel isn't telling anyone.
Even linux distros are on their way to manage the system in image-like way. See project atomic, or this video: https://youtu.be/XNLPkMDf9LI
I seriously doubt it. I just changed my broadband provider at home. Our Macs, mobile devices and WDTV connected to the new wifi router immediately, but it took 2 hours to get the Windows laptop to connect to the internet. It found the wifi network fine, but no internet. This has happened before. Googling found dozens of hits for this issue, all with different solutions that worked for different people and each time it's happened to me on the same laptop different solutions have worked, such as: Delete the device in device manager and then scan for new hardware; ipconfig /renew; fiddling with Advanced driver settings.
This time I fixed it by reverting from the Microsoft driver to the vendor provided driver. The last thing we need on our phones is hardware, drivers and OS developed by different companies that don't talk to each other and don't do proper whole-system integration testing on all builds and upgrades.
Plus, you can't just walk into a local Google Store and use the accidental damage insurance to replace your phone on the spot (or repair it within an hour or so) if you dropped it and cracked the screen.
I don't want to mail my phone in to a repair center and be without a phone for a few days. I want it fixed or exchanged in a short time while I wait, and I won't pay iPhone prices for a Pixel phone if I can't get that level of service.
Purchases of high-end items are not motivated merely the items themselves. They are also motivated by the level of service the buyer gets if something goes wrong. For example, if you bring your Toyota to the dealership for service, you'll be lucky to get a loaner car. If you bring your Lexus to the dealership for service, you'll almost certainly get a loaner car that's even nicer than the car you brought in.
If you buy an Apple product, you get a pretty big network of retail stores with free support and fast service turnaround. If you buy a Pixel, what do you get other than the phone itself?
FYI: I've been a long time Android user and can tell you that the process works different. And is actually not as bad as you think.
1) You call the hotline, they send you a link via mail 2) Clicking this link will place you in their shop with a promo-code 3) You buy the replacement phone 4) Once you've got the replacement you send in the broken one (or if you feel like it earlier) 5) Once they recieved the broken one, you get a refund on you purchase
Knowing this process so well is the reason I've bought me an iphone 7 now ;-)
Verizon helped me out and sent a refurb phone without me having to return my phone first. The refurb camera was even worse.
After that I went iPhone. No reason to pay the same price for Android and get crappy service, especially when the iPhone has resale value. A used Android has no resale value whatsoever.
However, if the Pixel is like other Androids the list price is a joke and carriers will be discounting it shortly.
I don't know about you, but if I was in the market for a used phone, I'd go for one that could run the latest OS.
The Pixel seems to me to be a vindication of the Apple model: controlling both the hardware and software can get you a pretty good product, and in the case of upgrades, you only have to support the hardware that you yourself have released. There is no technical reason Google can't support the Pixel phones for years, like Apple does, but I doubt they will do that.
If it really bothers you the open bootloader makes it easy to find AOSP built from whatever community that floats your boat.
Or I can buy an iPhone and run the latest software with zero effort.
That is a big difference, especially when you consider that the vast majority of consumers would have to look up the terms "AOSP" and "bootloader" after reading your comment, and even after looking them up, would have no idea what to do.
Specs are very often on par (this Pixel is pretty damn close to a OP3, less RAM and less ) and the phones are 40% or more cheaper! It's just plain stupid.
Good thing that offline web apps will start making most native apps obsolete in a few years.
I agree with this as an Android user. The lack of device support from Google is appalling. And all my nexus devices (4, 7) have had major hardware flaws that never get fixed - once you're past the warranty, you're SOL. The 7 had many touch screen problems, and a very flimsy charger port (which broke under warranty, then broke again after - so I can't charge it anymore :|).
If you want decent hardware on Android, you have to go with Samsung. But their support for devices is even worse than Google - my Tab S just got Marshmallow. And touchwiz really hurts the Android experience.
Compare to Apple - I still have a first generation iPad that my kids use, and it's still going strong. It's a bit dented, but that thing is a tank.
What a difference one year of device age can make.
But it is limited to iOS 5, and can't run anything but really ancient apps.
Frankly, I don't get all the hype about iOS' user experience - every time I've had to use an Apple device, I've found just about every task much more cumbersome.
That said, every so often there's something I need to do or want to do that's a little bit outside of the default setup. Little things that matter to me nonetheless. Things like keyboard layout, default apps, home screen layout, icon spacing, etc.
On iOS the keyboard thing seems to be solved now with addon keyboards but even those other minor preferences or layout tweaks are often limited or impossible on iOS (unless you manage to jailbreak your device). On Android they're usually just a setting change, app install, or (rarely) an APK install from an independent developer away.
This isn't meant so much as a critique of the Apple way of doing things. I'm well aware that my needs and wants aren't necessarily the norm or in line with the majority. Spending efforts addressing every possible use can cause just as much harm as good in a final product.
That said, once I have multiple options that both "succeed" well, I start to choose based on which one "fails" better (ie: which one makes it easier for me to change or fix the rare thing that doesn't just work the way I want it to).
People are always going to find computing on devices they don't normally use to be more difficult than computing on devices they normally use, yet to you this is proof Android is better?
I'd argue that iOS falls between the extremes you've highlighted. It isn't really a general purpose computing platform as evident in the differences between say how multitasking and filesystems are implemented and what they expose to the end-user. On the other hand, the core OS has always supported preemptive multitasking and has always had a real filesystem to boot. The limitations of the presentation are inconveniences to be sure, but still I can slap together an app in Objective-C or Swift and slap it on the phone with ease.
That said I'm sure there are some tasks more easily achieved on traditional systems. That noted, if memory serves this was also the case with the PC/desktop transition. Desktops couldn't do everything big iron could do, but they did enough, it would seem.
>People are always going to find computing on devices they don't normally use to be more difficult than computing on devices they normally use, yet to you this is proof Android is better?
I use an iPhone 6S daily at work, so I'm not one of those people and I don't deign to speak for them or anyone else. As far as my experience is concerned, yes, Android is better.
I never named any specifics on the matter of platform preferences as regards installation of custom roms.
You seem a bit defensive.
> I use an iPhone 6S daily at work, so I'm not one of those people [who ... find computing on devices they don't normally use to be more difficult than computing on devices they normally use]
You're employing a different and less expansive standard of normal use than I. Using a tool for work is using a tool in only a single context.
Unless you have a lot of time to burn playing around on your phone at work, or develop for the phone you use at work, you're not likely to get to know how to use the device very well outside of the specific tasks entailed in your job duties.
> and I don't deign to speak for them or anyone else.
Reference my comment to r00fus above and note the terminology I used when speaking of my opinions.
"I like a happy medium myself.", "I've found", "I can", "to my satisfaction", "I don't have to"
I made no less than five references to myself in a single paragraph where I rendered an opinion on personal preferences. And even then I didn't resort to suggesting experiences that forged my personal preferences dictates what is best for others.
> As far as my experience is concerned ...
"The plural of data is not anecdote."
> yes, Android is better
This is the kind of generalization I have a hard time with. Android is better for some tasks, and iOS for others. Just as Windows is better for some tasks, and macOS for others, and Linux others still. One should always use the right tool for the job. You won't see me making any sweeping claims about which platforms are better.
None of which is helpful when the battery is dead. The iPhone still wins on battery life. Maybe the new gen Androids will fix that. I hope so.
Edit: I added some data for battery tests in a comment below. Looks like my Android experience is out of date.
My wife has had two iphones (5, 6). Both die much faster than my androids (many many hours). We use them about the same.
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/mobile-phones/1402071/best-ph...
http://www.gsmarena.com/battery-test.php3
https://www.statista.com/statistics/280508/smartphone-batter...
Looks like Apple is middle of the pack among premium phones these days. My experience was with NEXUS 4 and 5, which would often be out of juice when I needed them.
FWIW: I think it's pretty sad that almost all of these phones are certainly collecting this data (even if only in internal dogfood populations, etc), but then the stats we get are based on random things like "talk time" or ...
I wonder if anyone started a public app project that auto-tracks and uploads battery stats that folks can participate in.
Believe me, batteries and power management on Android has improved since 2013.
HTC10: 1859 LG G5: 1579 S7: 1492 iPhone 7: 712
The results would be closer on pretty much any other test, but it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison on anything other than talk time. Most review sites still find that this generation of Android flagships have longer web browsing times than the iPhone 7.
1: https://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/smartphones/iphone-7-fi...
HTC10: 145.9 x 71.9
iPhone7: 138.3 x 67.1 (-7.6, -4.7 vs HTC10)
iPhone7+: 158.2 x 77.9 (+12.7, +6 vs HTC10)
What about the difference between ridiculously bulky and fat and normal size?
with whatsapp you can have better search that on the desktop:
https://web.whatsapp.com/ - allows you to setup the client for the web; here it is easier to search for messages.
The only way to have a good experience with email, calendars and contacts is to use Google Apps – which I refuse to migrate to. The stock apps have no support for IMAP IDLE, CardDAV, or CalDAV. You have to resort to 3rd party apps for these and they are without fail either slow, buggy, very unappealing visually, or all three.
There's no native caldav. I use a paid client called caldav-sync which is mediocre. For a while on android 5/lollipop, you had to install a second app (free from the same author) to prevent settings being wiped during OS upgrades/patches. When I upgraded to android 6 I couldn't figure out why calendars weren't syncing until I discovered caldav-sync decided to sync every 6 hours instead of every 5 minutes. The whole thing feels and works like a hack.
Using the gmail app as an imap client for fastmail is crap, particularly if you access the email account from a desktop. The Gmail app regularly desyncs from the state of your email. It has recently decided to announce old emails as new. If you move/delete an email in fastmail from the web client on your desktop, you have to manually tell gmail to sync or it won't notice, even hours after the fact.
I was hoping for a cheap nexus replacement and was also looking at the OnePlus 3. Dual sims are nice too. That's too bad that you don't like it...
Thanks for the Davdroid recommendation!
I believe many of the other third-party Exchange-connecting apps have the same type of options.
Nine had neither of these issues.
How surprising is it really that Android sucks if you refuse to use Google services? Where have you been the last 3-5 years?
It doesn't make sense to compare the core apps on iOS to the alternatives on Android. The core apps on Android are just as good as (I would say better than) the core apps on iOS.
These are things I find necessary for day-to-day stuff, but which are simply impossible on iOS. If you want good 3rd party integration, Android is your only option in many cases. You just have to find the good apps.
In the end, though, I think the idea with phones like these is that they work "best" if you use the services that the manufacturer supplies, be it Apple or Google. If you use Gmail, Google Drive, Google everything, it's got a lot to offer.
This is the go-to line for every Android fan. How many devices out there run stock Android? Is it possible to buy a device with stock Android? How much comp-sci experience are you going to need to make your device run stock Android?
What difference does it make how good the OS is if Google gives it's OEM's free license to ruin it?
So, yes, you can buy a device with stock android. It just has to be a google phone, not a 3rd party for the most part.
Is this strictly true if google bakes their apps in (play music etc.)
Except now, two issues: 1) More a quibble, but I'd say that people around here pushing AOSP makes the term "stock Android" a bit less clear.
2) Article claims the new Pixels will have some other variant of Android, based on current stock Nougat but with additional support baked in for things like their new VR headset and Google Assistant.
Which strengthens FuzzyZeus' point: determining which version of Android a given phone comes with (and which it can support, both now and in the future) is an extremely muddled game, with the OEMs and now Google itself not doing anyone any favors.
It just might not be as good, because its not controlled by google. But, I do think that argument died a long a time ago because of the cruft OEM's have been adding to android and the common refusal to upgrade phones (though that has been getting better lately).
Sadly, they only support Nexus (now Pixel devices), and this new iteration is very expensive.
With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design.
Jony Ive is probably the most brilliant consumer electronics hardware designer in the world, but I have yet to see any indication that he has any idea how to lead a platform UI design project. I had issues with Scott Forstall's style, but he was at least leading the charge somewhere.
In my opinion, force click, Siri, 3D wallpapers, etc, have not been major coups in terms of UI finesse. At best Apple is in a holding pattern right now, I haven't seen any indication that they're pushing the state of the art outside of the hardware. The animations keep getting flashier and smoother, but that's not really UI design.
I thought Ive's strong understanding of design methodology would be enough, but I think maybe software design requires a different way of thinking. I don't know.
Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web.
More of a Twitter Bootstrap thing, I think.
What does that mean?
I get that opinion. But allow me to play the devil's advocate:
Mobile interfaces are small and restrictive. Touch screens and gestures have zero discoverability. Interfaces must scale to a multitude of different screen sizes and resolutions. Flare hurts usability in these situations. When designers break convention it is far more likely to result in confusion or frustration by end users. Well defined standards can enable me to use your app without even looking at the screen and drastically improve accessibility for things like screen readers.
I think the tendency toward flare stems from design education that emphasizes print media and tries to make a direct translation into Web/UX Design. Print media, and advertisements are meant to grab your attention, establish unique brand design language and brand identity. But If I'm already on your website or using your app you already have my attention. You've already sold me. Now simply help me accomplish the task I am here for in the least painful way possilbe. Branching out beyond common guidelines and creating new interface conventions may scratch your creative itch but it is rarely more efficient or easy to use that established conventions.
Apps that follow it will all have a similar look and feel on a platform... however, you can still make both good and bad UIs within that (or any other) framework. It doesn't alleviate the need to work with a UI designer.
There are certainly a fair number of developers who will just download a Material-styled template. But please don't assume that you can't do much more.
Take a look at some of the showcase designs on the Material Design Lite site for examples: https://getmdl.io/showcase/index.html
Coming from someone who WANTS to love android for philosophical reasons and bought the google nexus, google nexus 5x. I always went back to iphone. The biggest issue is the device is not very good in comparison to the current gen iphone. It feels 1-2 gen behind in performance.
I still use a first generation Nexus 5. SNES/N64/PSP emulators run like a dream. Apps open/transition instantly.
What performance metric are you even using?
When Android stutters, you can put money on it being down to the garbage collector running at an inopportune moment. This is the downside of most Android apps being built in Java, whereas most iOS apps are written in Objective C, which uses reference counting and so you have more deterministic release of allocated memory. The upside of this is little or no stuttering, but the downside is that you can still end up with pauses, but they can be in places which are hidden from the user. The other downside of GC is that developers can lean on it a bit more than is justifiable to create needless duplicates of objects on the assumption that they'll be garbage collected eventually... which can lead to GC stutter. A lot of Android's 'slowness' issues would go away if devs were a bit more careful with how they allocate their objects.
Another thing that makes Android seem slower than iOS is that Android gives apps a pretty lengthy grace period when they hang for some reason and will alert the user if it thinks the app has hung. iOS, OTOH, is less tolerant of this kind of thing and will just kill the offending app and rely on the app to restore its state when restarted. This hides a lot of issues with apps on iOS that are more obvious on Android. Which choice is better is a matter of debate: the iOS route gives the better user experience 90% of the time, but when you want that 10%, you really want that 10%.
Emulators (and quite a lot of games too) tend to be written in C and C++, which means they do manual memory management or use the conservative Boehm GC, so you end up with little or no GC stutter. OTOH, if the developer isn't careful, you're more likely to end up with memory leaks.
> Good for you, but please don't even try to convince anyone of the super performance of your favourite phone
...maybe take your own advice?
Apple's leadership in UI design the last couple of years has been a little lackluster. While they seem to be able to iterate, with a few missteps, I'm less sure about their capability to get a whole revamp done right.
The talent is surely there but the question is whether the leadership and willing to take the right risks is. It's going to be interesting going forward, I'm guessing they will have to introduce something widget/tile -ish in the next phone
I don't think it has anything to do with hardware, they can be engineered in such a way they don't needlessly drain the battery, nor do I think most people would feel it was useless. Then again, people sometimes don't miss something before they have it :)
Right. Anything can be accessed so quickly a home screen should be more contextual than static app icons.
Well, perhaps they can license Live Tiles from Microsoft. There are definitely things to like there, and Microsoft's certainly not using them on phones anymore - at least not as far as real-world usage can show.
Why? It is easy, intuitive, and used by millions of people.
Change for changes sake?
Notifications are great for things that need your attention but the home screen becomes a little more of a seredipious view of app information that can increase the usefulness and engagement with an app
I would love to see the iPad interface evolve a bit and not look so much like my phone. I don't feel like they are using all that space as elegantly as they could be.
No wonder there is such a divide among users. I don't think age has anything to do with it though.
On Windows (and macOS) the desktop is fundamentally different, used differently, and is often obscured by your windowed content.
Luckly they managed to at least let users hide that in iOS10, but it's still a cesspool of rarely used apps.
Put another way.. You're manually 'fixing' the iOS UX to operate like the Android "default"?
I had to help a friend to find a qrcode app on Sunday. Look for qrcode in the store, 842 found. Wow... None of them has a review or stars. How do you trust them? We kept scrolling for a while, nothing. Compare that with the Google store. It doesn't tell me how many qrcode apps are there but it gives me a rating for every single one. Then it's the usual hunt for the app with no ads and least permissions, but that's the same on the iPhone.
As for the store, well, the App Store actually has standards and minimums for apps and reviews. I would think a google search for "best qrcode app ios" would yield better results than your strange method, but, hey, to each his own.
She was as clueless as me about the lack of stars. We looked for qrcode in the App store. This is what I would have done on my Android. She didn't suggest an alternative. A very basic iOS user?
The top result for me has over 800 reviews and ratings. The vast majority of them have at least some reviews.
Agreed, but with a slight nitpick - Duarte was hired to lead development on Palm's webOS designs. PalmOS was the aging predecessor.
This is a pretty subjective statement. It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative. Material extends MS's Flat design. I'm also not sure how much of that is Duarte, its a pretty open secret that Google makes use of some pretty high end digital agencies who aren't allowed to let folks know what they're working on.
WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs.
The Sidekick may have been his most interesting product but it was completely broadsided by the release of the iPhone and was n't anywhere near competitive to the Blackberry so I'm not sure how innovative it was.
If anything Duarte's had pretty good record for working on products with innovative features but never necessarily ground breaking on UI/UX
I've got to stop you there. WebOS was far ahead of its time, and especially considered in the context of a small startup going against established players, was brilliant.
It offered in some ways better and more intuitive usability than iOS, along with a great app development ecosystem and philosophy.
Palm's WebOS devices were a pleasure to use, in a time when that was a very rare thing for a mobile device.
It was clunky under the hood and never received enough love. It would have been interesting to see where WebOS (phone) would be today had Palm survived.
Stuff like Xposed is interesting, but I haven't seen any software for mobile that managed to match the kind of community driven tweaking that Preware fostered.
I see this any time WebOS is mentioned but this makes WebOS sound a lot more innovative than it was. WebOS is widely lauded for two things: (1) the card application interface and (2) the accompanying physics/gestures, especially swipe from edge. Now these are great and appropriately lauded but that is a short list that really pales compared to a similar list of things the iPhone OS had introduced at that time. Other than that WebOS is basically a nicely polished clone of the iPhone OS. Even the cards metaphor itself, the hallmark of WebOS, was used two years earlier in the original iPhone in Mobile Safari and Cover Flow.
Like what?
Don't see much credit for that original work being passed around, but I haven't dug up the facts.
I liked the WindowsPhone 8 instance, pity that's being flushed away. Hope it will be stolen and resold to the public.
All UX/UI design on major platforms is "derivative". None is ground breaking.
I find it funny how you back up your claim by showing an equally derivative work (LG Smart TV)
When someone reacts so negatively to material design that they won't use it, that is a failure. There's no matter of opinion there. The purpose of the design work is to make it usable.
But, what if I like/dislike the designers goals? In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design?
Not trying to prove any point. Just trying to understand your perspective.
If that detail helps them achieve their desired business outcomes, then yes. You might not like the product, but the design work is good. If you are trying to weed your garden, a Tesla is not useful to you. That doesn't mean it's a bad design, it just wasn't designed for that particular need.
All design comes from a specific set of values, and can only be evaluated within the context of those values. The notion of universal design is a fiction. It's the remnant of the colonialist mindset, where there is a presumption of universal values.
I would agree that I don't prefer Material design. It feels, to me, too much of a lowest-common-denominator.
While I wouldn't use it, if I feel frustrated or find usage unpalatable, that to me is an indicator of inferior design.
And even at that, parent goes for a controversial, "if it fits the goals of the artist it is fine" view of art, which is hardly some universally accepted standard for art.
No it cannot. First, because nobody cares about the goals of the designer -- it's all about the goals and satisfaction of the users.
(E.g. if the designer is in love with themselves and find everything they do great, then any crap design they've made that they're fine with, can be said to "satisfy their goals" and by this logic is "objectively good").
If you meant "satisfies the designer's stated goals when it comes to actual use" (e.g. make the UI intuitive, convenient, powerful, etc") then notice how all those words are still subjective, and the various hard objective design laws (Fitts law, etc) are not enough to cover the entirety of a design.
And of course all those are about the UX. A design can have great UX but still look like crap in the aesthetics department -- and this is also quite subjective.
>When someone reacts so negatively to material design that they won't use it, that is a failure. There's no matter of opinion there.
That's (someone's rejection) is the definition of subjective though.
So much for "design success is objective". If you meant "refusal to use can be objectively measured" sure, but that doesn't say much about the design.
Said person could be a bizarro outlier that prefers some way worse design for example.
I wouldn't say force click is a coup... it's like Android's menu button in the way it hides functionality and non-standard UX. Heaven knows what's going to happen if I trigger it random app. Google was wise enough to drop the Menu button in Android
Some things are still better - unified music controls, backups, and night shift especially. And the hardware/firmware is undeniably fantastic.
But Apple's emphasis on poor contrast and lack of differentiation within the UI really hurts usability, and there's still a lot of unexpected behaviors, such as links opening with a web page telling me to install an app I already have.
Going to back to only having two real notification modes - noisy or silent - felt like a major step backwards as well.
But worst of all was the lack of consistency between apps. I get that some people think MD on Android leads to apps feeling too similar, but I prefer that. My phone isn't a piece of art, it's a functional communication device. I want my apps to use the same, practical design language that gets to the point and doesn't get in the way by trying to be "different".
I don't know what the right answer is but Apple has one phone and one OS, android has many phones and many looks to their OS. This could be part of why there will never be an iPhone killer aside from Apple themselves.
To drive consumer demand in a direction that favors their software and online services, even if its other manufacturers (and, especially, other Android manufacturers) actually selling most of the hardware in the long run.
Not that they'd mind if their hardware took off, its just not the primary goal.
> Google Inc.’s Android operating system has generated revenue of $31 billion and $22 billion in profit
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-a...
They've sold the Nexus phones directly for quite a while now.
Which is stupid, and particularly so in the case of the competing platforms market of this, where even if a strategy ends up being long-term bad for Google, if it lures people into Android and away from iPhone, there are barriers to switching back, and Google's hypothetical loss is more likely to be Samsung's gain than Apple's.
But this is all by design. The profit-share metric -- a metric that you never, ever, ever heard about before iPhone became a highly profitable phone with a low market share -- is a vanity metric that's made precisely to make a low market share/high profitability phone look good. The flaws of the metric are baked into it.
Apple's profits are amazing for them. Their market-share is not great, and their percentage of industry revenue is not great. Trying to hide the latter fact by using one metric to report both of those things is stupid.
Having money means you can continue to keep up with the investments in technology needed to stay relevant in the mobile phone business.
And the reason people keep bringing up the profit share metric is because companies like HTC, Sony, LG were running at losses for so many years that it put in jeopardy their continued presence in the mobile phone market. And nobody wants to buy a phone that isn't supported in a year or two.
Huawei and Apple have roughly equal marketshare. If "nobody wants" to buy a phone from an unprofitable manufacturer, how come that's true?
Everyone would love to have Apple profit margins but their market share is so small that there's plenty of room to co-exist without "killing" Apple.
That's _very_ different to how Google went to market prior. Is this going to materially impact the iPhone? I don't know. But it is different enough that it warrants some sort of "This is a new approach by Google to taking on the iPhone" headline.
Google doing it "too" doesn't sound like a game changer.
MS started making their own hardware and it certainly helped push the market but the Sufarce never turned into the 'iPad killer' that tons of sites decided to declare it.
It's a new Android phone, Google was heavily involved (more than the Nexus line). That's it. That's not bad, but it doesn't automatically make something an X killer.
The Surface is basically a superior option to the iPad Pro, which all accounts give inferior sales to.
Allow me to repeat.
It runs full windows.
I'm a grad student. I have a workstation in my office. But at home, it's perfect for reading research papers thanks to the high resolution display, the fact that I can disconnect the keyboard, and the included pen which I can use to annotate.
Yes, the iPad can do all that, but I can reconnect the keyboard, and continue using Matlab, or log in remotely to my office machine and continue my office work, or edit spreadsheets/PPTs/thesis in full MS Office. And it's light enough that I can throw it in my backpack "just in case" I need it. Honestly, the being able to disconnect the keyboard thingy seems gimmicky before you get used to it. After you do, it's a godsend.
They're really quite nice. Not sure why people are predisposted to hate them. Certainly it can't be the usual privacy concerns: the iPad Pro is more instrumented than any install of Win10 could ever dream of getting away with.
There are a lot of windows apps that are designed and work really well on the tablet. It's not like Apple holds a monopoly here.
How many non-crossplatform apps does iOS have? How many of those don't have acceptable substitutes for at least most use cases?
https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Apple-iPhone-7-camera-review...
Project Fi + Nexus 5X + Stock Android is as good as it gets in integration and UX. The other day I lost my phone so I typed "where is my phone" into google. It showed me immediately. How many passwords do you have to type and licences to accept to do that on your Apple cloud?
I agree the article doesn't explain it very well, but the bottom line is google is now controlling hardware, software, network and full online life (search, gmail, google play, calendar, map, etc) and they have the capacity to integrate it all. I recognize people are happy with their iPhones and they won't switch because of switching cost or fashion, but Google is creating some word class product here nonetheless.
No out-of-the-ordinary licenses, I just have to use the find-my app on iOS or my password + the iCloud.com website to locate any of my missing devices (including laptops), and make them play a sound. Apple's internet services are often behind, but I don't think this is a good example here - it just works, the UX is very discover-ably named "find my x", and it's reasonable to require a password for this.
I think we need real competition as consumers. I know I don't want to see Apple's approach of the phone being the product and privacy as a feature being "killed". But I don't think they're in any danger yet.
You'll miss the passwords the day your wife turns the home computer on, googles that and finds out you're in some other woman's house. All without passwords or licences. ;P
This would be so great if the nexus was an all-purpose, general use phone. Lack of storage expansion (sd card) makes this, in my opinion, not the case.
I made the switch to Nexus last year for work, but my wife is still a devoted iPhone user and recently upgraded to the 7. As I was setting it up for her I was shocked at how poor the UX was and the number of times the iPhone asked for a password (in some cases asking for the same password multiple times). Just a week earlier I had set-up a new Android device and I entered my Google login details once and that was it. The contrast was jarring.
The only interesting thing in the whole presentation was the talk about AI which isn't really even anything that has to do with the hardware but the servers that it connects to.
Maybe if they released a 4" phone or a standalone smartwatch they'd have something special. But two generic phones? Meh.
0: https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_4431_s...
I can tell you haven't really used any Google products in some time or if ever. And that bit about Microsoft and UX design - I couldn't tell if you were joking or not. You may want to add emoticons next time to make it more clear.
Well, iTunes sucks, and it is pivotal in the Apple ecosystem.
> For going on ten years we've seen the "iPhone killers" come and go...
The headlines says Google's first "real threat" to iPhone, not that this is an iPhone "killer". Let's not be hyperbolic.
You don't need a lot of detail other than the fact that Google is designing, building and selling smartphones (and increasingly other devices) to recognize as legitimate the claim that this is merely a threat to iPhone.
> Now, Google is no Samsung, but they're a long way from Apple or even Microsoft on the UX front.
This seems biased. Everyone has their own tastes, but Google's software and UX have become pretty top notch across many of their product lines, imo. It's fine to state your personal preference or dislike of their design ethos but painting with such a broad and unequivocal brush is silly. This is not a universally shared sentiment.
> And yet not a single hard detail in the article as to why the headline might be true.
Again, you seem to be creating a strawman in taking about an "iPhone killer" claim. Certainly this represents some kind of threat. Other threats to Apple's iPhone have sprung up in the past, and some to great success. Google's new foray may or may not be successful in its own right over time and it may or may not impact the iPhone's success, but I bet Apple themselves view it as a competitive threat to monitor.
> Point is, this article does nothing to relieve my ignorance, which is why I clicked on the thing to begin with.
The tl;dr is that Google created a major new hw division that spans multiple devices including new smartphone lines and Google directly will carry the supply chain and inventory risk on their balance sheet. This is a major, major move financially and strategically and it's all that's necessary to back up the actual headline claim. On top of that, they provided some specifics on the phone offerings (eg two sizes, first phone to offer Android N, first phone with built in Google Assistant, the Pixel's design was unveiled (certainly a large part of Apple's phone unveilings, so why not count it for Google's?) including backside glass, lots of camera details (12MP, DXO Mark ratings, auto-stabilization for vid), free unlimited cloud storage, the fingerprint scanner+track pad, Daydream VR support, etc, etc).
Not sure how you came away with such a stark view of the articles headline vs content.
I'd argue, based on Bloomberg's form, that "real threat" is verging on hyperbolic.
1 TB of storage. I run out of space on my phone all the time and would love nothing more than unlimited (or close to it) storage on the device.
I honestly could care less about VR or home assistant.
Probably more of a perception/mindshare thing.
1: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/02/18/ios-android-market-share...
If you liked Android before, this will look great to you (though very expensive). If you didn't like it so much before, nothing has really changed with this specific device to change your mind.
The article headline is just clickbait.
I have been running my Nexus 5 into the ground (soldered on a new power button when the original broke) in anticipation of the next Nexus phone. Pixel is no Nexus.
Seriously, what does this have that the year-old Nexus 6P and 5X don't, other than incremental hardware improvements? And a massive price hike? Why should I buy this?
(Seriously, Google? You want $650 for a phone with a 1080p screen? I know there's benefits to a lower resolution but then why not drop the price? It's ridiculous.)
My perception is that Google no longer knows what it's doing. Reference Allo for an even better example. The company can coast on their existing products but only for so long.
Mobile has to lead the way, which Samsung and Oculus did very successfuly with GearVR.
Cardboard was seen as a gimmick and now it has graduated to become a daydream.
This is a positive step for VR.
2016 year of VR.
As someone who owns a 5X:
- The Pixel is a premium 5" phone, not a budget one. It has a flagship SoC rather than a mid-tier SoC.
- The camera is better and more responsive (the camera on the N5X is slow and annoying).
- The body isn't plastic, which means there will be less issues with heat and CPU throttling than on the N5X.
- I can finally get a phone with a reasonable amount of storage and no bloat. The 5X only went up to 32GB and had no expansion. Alternatives from Samsung etc. are mostly carrier locked, unrootable and stuffed with OEM overlays.
- There's no camera bump, so it can sit on flat surfaces less awkwardly.
- They actually mentioned this phone during the announcement, unlike the 5X last year. They might actually pay it some attention in the future.
what makes it premium other than the fact that they're charging lots of money for it? i can't find a real differentiator over something like the oneplus 3, which costs half as much.
i agree with you that it's better than the 5X, but comparing it to this year's competition, it doesn't look so good.
but since the Nexus 5X was released, there's been a bunch of metal bodied phones with the SD820 released that only cost $399 - the oneplus 3, zte axon, honor 5x, xaoimi mi5... and there's nothing to differentiate the pixel from those phones, other than a 40% higher price.
The Oneplus 3 is four times the size, the firmware running on it tends to be buggy, and the battery life is nothing close to the same.
I get it - if you're on a budget you can probably do better with the Oneplus 3. But there are a MILLION options in the budget space. Pixel is about showcasing a high end Android phone WITHOUT all the bloat that Samsung adds. I can just about guarantee if Samsung would relent and just run stock android, Google would end the nexus/Pixel program overnight.
So... not the same. Also the GPU is faster too.
I'll agree with you that it's silly that they're still trying to pass a 1080p screen and lack of SD card as high end though.
But the feature list for what is now Googles top phone is underwhelming. 4 GB of RAM is barely adequate - it should be 6 GB like the other Snapdragon 821 flagship. No water proofing? That's the new black. Bottom-facing speakers? Complete regression from the Nexus 6. Including a smoking camera but no optical image stabilization? Make up your mind - is it a digital camera competitor or not?
And frankly since there's no waterproofing there's no excuse for a fixed battery and no sd-card slot. Even some waterproof phones offer those features now. Google needs to blow Apple away with features rather than aping the latest iphone.
Why does it need OIS if its EIS produces a stabilized image better than anyone else's image stabilization?
The feature is image stabilization - whether or not it's done optically or electronically is irrelevant, all that matters is how good the end product is. And DXO's review claims that the image stabilization in Pixel is superb.
https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Pixel-smartphone-camera-revi...
That's a fair point. If it indeed does produce a great image I have no complaint.
Do you have a link that supports the claims made above? That one simply does not.
Yes it does, but it'd be under "blurry photos" description rather than stabilization because stabilization is more inherently a video issue than a photo one.
In the case of OIS and photos you want to look at the low-light performance, which DXO did test and the Pixel did do very well on.
I'm not disagreeing with you but what makes you say this? I've never owned a phone with more than 2GB of RAM and I'm not sure what I'm missing out on.
> no optical image stabilization
I trust a software company like Google with EIS, particularly given their work with HDR+. I owned an iPhone 7 for about a week and loved the stabilisation Google's app did on my Motion Stills.
> Google needs to blow Apple away with features rather than aping the latest iphone.
The impression I got from the announcement is that that's what they see their assistant being. Personally that doesn't win me over at all but we'll see how it goes. I could see my mother and her friends all wanting the phone that can talk to them (and it looks more impressive than Siri).
It's Linux under the hood which will always make use of more memory, but our phones are slowly migrating towards service platforms. When my phone is fully kitted out playing Ingress with friends I'm running Slack, Glympse, Zello, team-specific app(s), Ingress and maps. I want the device snappily switching between and/or giving cycles to all those apps as needed without being forced to save state off to my flash storage which is a wasting asset.
I would imagine VR apps will be even more hungry with the large and complex objects and interactions modeled and displayed.
On EIS yup if that replaces OIS I'm fine with it. The assistant may be really cool but it won't remain a google-exclusive for long and it doesn't justify a (in my mind) $200-$300 premium for the phone.
I'll probably pick up the pixel XL when the sales start but as someone who has been an Android acolyte since my developer's edition G1 came in the mail this is not a compelling upgrade for me from the Nexus 6, particularly at this price.
> It's Linux under the hood which will always make use of more memory,
Linux won't really be the beneficiary of all the extra RAM in this case. The motivation behind the extra RAM is Java.
It is well known (i.e. researched) that garbage collection system performance is heavily dependent on free RAM. You typically want around 4x the amount of your peak memory usage to keep the garbage collector speed reasonable. The more free RAM, the better the performance.
http://sealedabstract.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screen-...
But having 4x has been a real challenge for mobile and Android over the years, especially as people want to do more and more with the phones. It also didn't help that Dalvik and ART are new ground-up implementations of the Java VM which means a lot of optimizations for garbage collection needed to be reimplemented from scratch.
The lack of needing to support a garbage collector is a big reason Apple can get away with shipping far less RAM in their phones which in turn helps keep their profit margins high.
You mean support for the OS, not for the hardware, which is probably more of a concern for phone users.
Innovations in photon capturing technology like light field be damned. This is the best.camera.ever.
Did this not factor into your decision?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/12886058/iphone-7-specs-co...
You know, I knew the day would come that we'd be saying this unironically, but in still surprised it's here.
The Samsung Note 7 comes to mind with its phenomenal build (except for the explosions), display and some unusual features like a stylus and microSD slot.
But what does the Pixel offer here for a premium price in comparison?
The CPU is premium but weaker than current iPhone processors. Nexus cameras have always been crap even though Google always claimed that with the new generation and some revolutionary changes they have finally "fixed" it. And they always drop support rather quickly, although they always claim otherwise when they launch a new product.
The Nexus devices were at least cheap and so I could overlook this stuff, but I'm not going to spend that kind of money on a device that will probably be a Nexus device with a metal case.
These options exist because many people do prefer larger smartphones. In fact this is the first year where there's higher demand for the iPhone 7 Plus than there is for the iPhone 7.
DxO rated them 84, while iPhone 7's is 86. While Pixel's is ranked 89, it's not that far ahead. And 5X is a really cheap phone, I routinely see deals under $200.
What is "SoC" an abbreviation for?
If my next phone is an iPhone, it will likely be because of the camera.
For the Pixel phone, I kind of wish Google had focused on the phone to make something far better than the iPhone camera.
Are you serious? Did you know that the larger iPhone 6S Plus and 7 Plus are 1920x1080? Or that the iPhone 7 is 1334 x 750? And you're complaining that Google's 5 inch phone is only 1920x1080 and have the nerve to question what they're doing? Ridiculous, indeed.
This reminds me of the Pixel C that allegedly was supposed to run Chrome OS until a change late in the development, and the Nexus 6 that allegedly was supposed to be an Android Silver device by Motorola until the Android Silver program was scrapped late in the development process. Will Google follow through on any hardware project from start to finish without interference from above?
The pixel's similarities are towards the htc one A9, not the htc 10.
Apple wants $650 for a phone with a ~720p screen.
Supposedly it's open for integration with mobile apps, so you could say 'Order ahead my usual at Philz', and it would ask you back, 'Order a large tesora for pickup at Philz Coffee in Santa Clara in 15 minutes?', to which you say 'yes'. Theoretically, anyways.
I chose it because "Set an alarm for 8am" really is the best interface to interact with that subsystem.
"Please buy tickets to concert"
"Front row tickets to concert purchased for $500"
"Wait no, buy the cheapest tickets!"
"Cancelling order! Purchased last row tickets for $10"
"Only $10? Well maybe I can spend a little more an not be in the last row"
etc
Currently, i only use it for alarms. I'd love if Assistants became good enough to conversationally text someone.
"Alexa, book me a flight to Sydney for Wednesday"
Alexa knows that I'm in Melbourne, that I always fly economy class on flights under three hours, have a strong preference for Oneworld airlines, fly direct whenever possible, and like to fly in the mornings except between 8am or 10am on weekdays.
"I found three flights on Wednesday that match your preferences. On your kitchen screen now. Which one shall I book?"
The next development after that would be intermodal transport scheduling and calendar awareness: "Alexa, book me travel for the Sydney board meeting". "Here's an itinerary that matches your diary and preferences."
However, that is besides the point. This was just an illustration of what is possible if your VPA is a preference-aware negotiation agent.
Of course you are free to choose a closed platform, but it doesn't have to be that way.
That, and seeing what in says in response to personal questions, insults, jokes, etc.
"Text my wife <message>", "Call my wife", "Play <band> on Spotify", "Open Waze" (after playing music on Spotify, Waze is no longer on the screen so I can switch back to it).
The reservations stuff? No way, I want to choose my seats and price point.
Let's say I wish to book an Uber. Usually, I open pop open the app and hit the request button. Doesn't take long at all. I get visual confirmation through the map and the little lollipop Uber driver photo. It's fast and I have the feedback to know that what I set out to do has been done. What if I had used the assistant? Well, now I have to waste a lot of time chatting to it. Sometimes it reads my address wrong or it doesn't understand Australian. So after a few mishaps, I finally get told that it's on the way. Okay. Then the twitching starts. The need to check that it was actually entered properly kicks in. So I open up the app to check the lollipop heating-seeking Uber driver is on target. I end up at the same place I attempted to avoid. Yet this avoidance was less efficient. I didn't receive enough feedback so I was unable to trust.
The second example is ordering a movie ticket to go see Batman 27 with my wife. I ask the assistant awkwardly to book for me and give it a time. It tells me that it's all good and dandy. The trust issues then kick in. So I go head off to my e-mail to triple check my confirmation. I wasn't active during the booking process, so the feedback is all I have to work with. It's date night too, so I can't waste it or I'll be sleeping on the couch. I've just wasted time.
Then it occurs to you that by bypassing their system, you may have possibly missed some little announcement or some benefit that is only visible to you during the booking process. For example, doing it manually may show me that there's a time slot that has more ticket availability than the one we were originally headed to. This means an emptier cinema so that I don't get weird looks when she starts telling me about her day mid-movie. The assistant wouldn't have told me that. The assistant also can't toggle around the tick boxes and drop boxes that would have told me I would have been able to do a 2-for-1 deal if we had gone an hour later.
Being there during the actual process isn't always a bad thing. Abstracting away these manual processes would be fine if all processes were identical. They're not though. You're losing too much control and being provided with too little feedback. Now, I can very much see the benefit of the assistant while driving. It makes sense there. You're usually unable to hold the device and that form of interaction is a best fit.
I don't think it's ready yet. I can do everything faster manually. It doesn't add anything at the moment, it just subtracts. It's the same reason I have no use for Cortana on Windows 10 or Siri. Why would I talk to the computer when it's considerably more efficient to just start typing.
* Set up an alarm
* See the Distance
* Search nearby places/restaurants/gas stations
* Play some song
* Look up facts
* Look up news
* See my agenda for the day
* Search for my personal photos and maybe much more....
I rarely use the voice input. The thing I liked about allo is that I can chat with it. Even when i'm in a crowded bus, I can use my assistant instead of saying "OK Google".
* Quick conversions "How many Tablespoons are in a Cup"
* Setting Reminders "Remind me at 9:30am today to pay my rent"
* Setting Timers "Set a time for 10 minutes"
Anything else and I can normally do it faster. That's not to say Siri couldn't beat me at doing something but that I have to repeat myself or I get the dreaded "I search the web and found this..." Not only are the results normally shit but it's Bing.... Need I say more? Timers, conversions, and reminders are the only thing she can consistently beat me on. Also I RARELY use her in public as it's distracting/annoying to the people around me. Reminders in the only thing I will use in public and only if I need to enter it in fast. If I have the time I'll manually enter it.
"I paused the playback."
<playback continues>
Also, reservations are pretty easy to do over voice. "Book me a table for 2 at Hakkasan this Friday at 7" is enough for an app to get right, clocking in at only 11 words.
I don't like Apple because it's a walled garden and millions other reasons.
I don't like Samsung because they bloat Android.
I don't like Huawei because I don't trust the Chinese government to not do stuff to it.
I don't like LG and HTC because the smartphone market is slipping away from them.
Am I just getting old?
Americans - tap the network backbone.
What's the difference?
I see what you did there (o;
(I wish them luck...)
I bought the BQ Ubuntu tablet. I hate to say it, but it's terrible. You have to set up a cloud account with Canonical to download or update apps (no reason given). Most of the apps are pretty bad. It's constantly pinging YouTube and news websites to show me stuff I don't care about, and can't turn off. No easy way to set up a VPN. No CalDAV, CardDAV. Difficult to imagine Shuttleworth himself using one.
Fine for watching films on airplanes, but very little else.
That's not true, it's right there in the network settings. I use it. Maybe it just doesn't support the type of VPN you want to use?
It's tolerable, and refreshingly non-intrusive compared to Android. At one point I started craving Snapchat and put Android back on, but all the intrusive nag screens put me off and I went back to Ubuntu.
It crashes a lot but that might just be my Nexus 4, it used to do it on Android too.
It's a bit slow, the camera app is rubbish, there's no Snapchat, the email client has some weird bugs, there's no adblock. But it has Telegram, and it can do calls and texts, the web browser is OK, and the terminal app is good.
I see it uses USB-C but I don't understand the difference between Dash Charging and just regular fast charging over USB-C. It feels like unnecessary confusion.
Even after Googling I'm left wondering what the difference is beyond patents - as a user why do I care about this what method it uses to charge quickly?
Just charge quickly, and do it with any (specs compliant) USB-C cable if it can be negotiated with the power brick.
This is an interesting option for a phone despite that though, I'll have to find a colleague or friend who has it to checkout the OS and inspect for bloatware but this looks promising.
You might call the branding unnecessary confusion, but in my experience it's been a differentiating feature, one that less tech savvy people I know mention when talking about reasons to switch to a OnePlus 3. And it's not a marketing gimmick either; I've seen it work in real life, and it's speed is kind of incredible.
I've never seen appeal in new release phones. If there was some high end Android game I'd want to play, I wouldn't want to play it on a tiny screen anyway and I'd just play it on ARC. As it was, I still think the S4 is plenty spiffy a device for day to day use, and my S5 is even faster than that.
It is similar on the desktop. Who needs a high end i7 when an AMD APU does good enough? Unless you need performance, riding the bleeding edge is a waste of money and frustration when things break.
Unfortunately, most people in the US have no idea Sony even makes phones because the company has utterly neglected to market them here.
I don't like Samsung because they bloat Android.
Also, I use google's keyboard, but once in a while, samsung puts back theirs (after an update or whatever), and it infuriates me.
Samsung _does_ get in my way, but it's possible it's because I have an old phone and the newer ones are better at this.
Nest was broken out as a peer to Google, but now apparently hardware is using Nest staff and expertise, but hardware is part of Google.
And apparently this new hardware team is going whole-hog after the smartphone market, which is WAY larger than thermostats and web cams. But Nest is an Alphabet sub, and hardware is under Google.
And Android needs a "firewall" to protect existing hardware vendor relationships from the new hardware team. But both Android and hardware remain under Google, with YouTube and Search.
And there are 2 separate Alphabet subs for biosciences, and 2 separate subs for finance.
It doesn't look like it's implementing any sort of coherent strategy. Aside from company politics, why are some programs peers to Google, and others are subsidiaries of Google?
Started from scratch, yet the end result looks like a iPhone knockoff from a random Chinese shanzhai company?
Galaxy S7 Edge is f*ing gorgeous.
i mean look at it, what is the difference? http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/06/iphone...
First of all, the discussion here was about the design/look of the phone and plagiarism and there was no similarity in their look as another commenter already proved. But even in terms of operation, there was no similarity either. The LG Prada had a UI that was meant for non-touchscreen phones operated through a touchscreen. Scrolling was done.. by moving scrollbars. You couldn't scroll unless you touched the scrollbar itself. Those scrollbars were small and the touchscreen was unreliable. Fun times! The experience was like using a Windows Mobile PDA/Phone with a touchscreen instead of a stylus. Which made everything much worse. It didn't have the iconic homescreen that shows all the apps you may want for quick access either. And trying to browse the web on that device was a worse experience than the non-touchscreen competitors like the Nokia N95, which was a much better pre-iPhone device than the Prada.
Any mention of the LG Prada in comparison to the iPhone is just revealing you as a baseless Apple hater who does not comprehend the amount of innovation Apple brought to the market and how it changed the landscape. I don't even use iPhones anymore, as midrange, cheaper Android devices suit my needs just fine these days. But those phones owe a big lot to the groundwork Apple laid out in terms of UI. Even in terms of software tech. Chrome forked off webkit, and webkit was the first engine to ever be truly usable on mobiles. Browsing the web on an iPhone was a game changing experience before the market started photocopying everything Apple did.
Frankly, with Apple already having sued over phone designs.. i'm shocked this is so blatantly similar to the iPhone.
Only thing that feels unique is that weird glass bit on the back.. and that's ugly as hell imo.
If they truly started from scratch and ended up here then this hardware initiative is going to fall flat. But I'm gonna guess they didn't start from scratch and this is just a rebadged device as people suspect.
Why on earth would you launch such a cheap plasticky looking device in such a similar form than your competitors device last year when their update was moving that device into more premium materials (iPhone 6 looks positively cheapo next to the 7) and making it seamless.
95% of the visitors (startups, entrepreneurs, investors, executives) had iPhones. We later confirmed this by looking at the network stats and couldn't believe it. In a country where Android statistically has 80% marketshare. The Android users loved the product, but we failed because we couldn't generate word-of-mouth.
For the target audience of the Pixel, this is an uphill battle.
Go where the customers are, observe what they are doing and make something they can use.
I truly see a big opportunity. Launching at startup events is wrong unless your customers are them.
Network stats viewer discretion advised. The log content may be self selecting to certain individuals and is not representative of the larger population.
If your app is targeting a non-startup audience and you can identify a conference or tradeshow more relevant to your actual audience, that may be a better place to try for attendee interest than a startup conference.
The market share is bottom heavy.
Pretty much all the data indicated that iOS users will readily pay for apps and content, while far fewer Android owners do. Attribute this to whatever reason you want, but it seems foolish to chase after a market that costs more to develop for (due to fragmentation), more to maintain for (due to ancient versions of Android), and won't actually net you as much revenue.
One of the best things about the Nexus range was they offered the Google vision of android at a reasonable price. The Nexus 4, 5 and 6 were affordable.
I purchased my Nexus 5 for a shade below £300 when it came out, which I thought was excellent value for money in comparison to how much I had paid for a Samsung previously.
This Pixel line seems to have abandoned that ideal to compete directly with the iPhone.
Personally I'd feel very uncomfortable walking around with a £600+ phone.
First, hardware so great that it remain excellent for more 2 years of usage for most use cases and/or price remain attractive so one does not mind upgrading after 2 years.
The Google Pixel laptop was there to further Google's own thing, not compete with the MacBook. The laptop has better hardware than the Apple or PC offerings - a 3:2 touchscreen in super-hi-res, amazing speakers under the keyboard, the nicest feeling keyboard ever, the finest of trackpads and a gorgeous aluminium case that just feels nice to touch. For what it does - surf the internet - nothing connects to wifi so easily and scrolling big pages is a very speedy thing. Yet you cannot run Word or Photoshop so it is generally reviewed as a crazy, expensive machine.
So I see some of this design philosophy in this phone. The AMOLED screen and the exceptional camera are features I would expect from a Pixel gadget, not a Nexus gadget.
Is the Pixel phone really just an over-priced Nexus phone? Not at all, it is about raising the bar as to what is possible. The VR hardware needs this phone.
Despite today's hype this will not sell in iPhone quantities, even with Verizon as a carrier. It is too expensive for that.
When you look at how much you do get for GBP 300 from Motorola and whomever else I would say that the Nexus idea has worked, there are plenty of phones out there that are excellent value for money even if not with all the latest flagship features.
I would argue that with 32GB SSD storage and only the ability to browse webpages that the Pixel laptop is basically useless as a "normal" use machine (ie for people that like to create stuff locally on a microcomputer without being tethered to a mainframe, or devs, eg compile C++ on it, or store any normal amount of data on it) so does come across as an extremely overpriced terminal.
But as for this phone - I am not sure who the target market is myself. I know I am not their market, that's for sure!
You mean not including the time they bought Motorola?
We're hackers, let's get fucking excited about the new cool gadgets! This phone is awesome.
How about, before nitpicking and criticizing, we take a moment to appreciate and celebrate the new technology developed by our colleagues?
What qualifies as "new technology" by your high standards? Do you expect it to be able to mine uranium while giving you a blowjob? I'm pretty sure it'll be able to do the later thing when new cool VR apps come around =)
Creating new things is hard. Creating new complicated thigs is incredibly hard. I think we would live in a much better world if people, instead of bitching, would support and cheer for anything new that is being created.
Well, why don't we start at the standards that Google is advertising with? It's them who are acting like this is the best thing since sliced bread, while it's really just yet another average phone.
I think it's okay to have an intelligent, critical discussion about new things. But what I am observing on the recent Hacker News threads does not feel like that. It feels like another mindless trend. People in pop culture enjoy picking apart failures of celebrities. People here enjoy finding flaws in anything new released by a big company. I do not like this part of human nature. Putting it on hold would make HN a more fun place to hang out at.
The point is that we've seen this strategy before (Nexus) and there's not much in value add over some generic cheap Android phone.
Maybe you care about the camera, but I barely use mine except as a scanner replacement when sending documents.
All of the interesting announcements were about everything except the hardware, which IMO was extremely boring, and they've discontinued their mid-range line of phones so it's not even clear that you can get the software on other phones. You could argue this is exactly what Apple does, but that's the reason I refuse to buy Apple products.
I'm expecting and hoping a flop that causes a return to the spirit, if not the name, of the Nexus line.
Yah, if I go back through my photos there's the occasional "that looks cool!" but the vast majority fall into 3 categories: receipts, equipment and equipment closets, and cats. None of those scream a need for exceptional image quality.
Even look at Flickr's top camera usage: https://www.flickr.com/cameras (which has a selection bias towards people who take and upload certain pictures to Flickr)
Think about the number of other places images are taken (and shared!) Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. etc. I think you might be in the minority when it comes to images.
Only thing new here is camera enhancements. Nothing new, really.
"Google Assistant" replaces the Google search bar... but only on the Pixel? So this is yet another Android device that behaves differently from every other.
The exclusive carrier is Verizon. Why not Google Fi?
The default video app is Duo. Why not Hangouts?
Does "Google Now On Tap" get replaced by the assistant for the Pixel? Is that just for the Pixel?
I don't get it. I don't understand how Google can think this produces a cohesive, meaningful experience for their users when they keep changing things or fragmenting their platforms.
Edit: Full disclosure, my only smartphone is a Nexus 5X. I like it, I don't like Google's platform chaos.
I think Google Now On Tap is gone.
Start assistant from homescreen: blank conversation.
Start assistant from screen with something on it: conversation with context grabbed from the screen.
They are in a difficult situation though - if they don't announce new stuff, the short-sighted industry will think they are stagnating, instead of being robust and reliable and having mature APIs that you can count on not to change.
And who is the servicer of broken phones? Is there a warranty? Can I get a customer service agent on a real voice line?
Given Google's track record of hardware they could have answers for all of this and I still wouldn't own one.
Very responsive, and yes, a real customer service agent picked up the phone.
And who is the servicer of broken phones? Is there a
warranty? Can I get a customer service agent on a real
voice line?
I would hope they have the same support, or better, for their more expensive hardware.
Silicon is not a buzzword. It is the element with which the processors are built. Perhaps it's colloquial or jargonistic to refer to processors as silicon, but it's not a buzzword.
Adds some depth to the title of the movie "Synecdoche, New York"
Not to mention the fact that Google seems to have a habit of deprecating their own apps for seemingly no apparent reason.
Either way, non removable lithium batteries usually take care of the obsolescence issue anyway. After two years, devices seem to barely hold enough charge for an hour.
This is the most frustrating thing for me. I have a three year old HTC M7 which works beautifully (running a stripped down ROM and I avoid all app updates). However, the battery is starting to get weak, and I’m afraid to take it apart.
I wish the LG G5 was more competitive. The removable battery is a huge deal to me, especially now that everything supports rapid charging, which I’m sure wreaks havoc on batteries.
> The latest iOS versions run incredibly slow (or not at all)
Take Google Chat / Talk / Hangouts / Duo / whatever is next. They must surely see how many people are using those apps before they decide to rewrite it for no obvious reason??
Fortunately, the slim case I have produces a raised lip around the camera bump, so that if I'm careful, I'm not scraping and scratching the protective glass against every surface I set the phone down on.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Front_and_bac...
Note the large black bar at the top.
It is glass and there are incidents where it cracks, causing unpleasant damage that is difficult to fix.
This is a "courageous" decision ;)
I guess what I'm really asking is if I will be able to flash a custom "ROM" and kernel to this. I've heard rumors of Google taking a more aggressive stance on locking down their hardware, so I'd like to know if there's been any new information regarding this.
If I can't flash custom software to this, I may get the iPhone or HTC 10 instead. The main attraction to Android phones to me was the fact that you can flash modified kernels to do things like force fast charge on USB data links, etc…
You may or may not be able to flash custom ROMs to you Pixel, but if you choose not to, you'll probably have a fairly optimal stock Android experience. If you absolutely have to have custom everything, there are hundreds of other Android handset options, which is a boon for everyone.
But the Pixel C is also a Pixel device and also Android so there's definitely precedent for them allowing unlocks.
So... Can anyone convince me that this thing is going to be different from the iPhone killers that are reported on every year in these regurgitated press releases?
My only problem with Apple right now is they won't sell me an unlocked iPhone7 Plus. Every single person I talk to at Apple gives me a different story on how to buy one, but if I show up at the store with money, they won't sell it to me, or even reserve it. I even offered the store to just hold on to my credit card for a week or whatever and mail it back to me. They thought I was crazy! ;)
Why not just order it from the Apple Online Store?
I'm in the US - maybe this is not available in your region.
Maybe not the greatest UI decision - but it's hard to imagine someone who isn't already on a carrier.
Are you trying to buy a "sim free" phone? I believe those are expected to go on sale soon.
Seriously though I showed up at Apple with a credit card and a SIM card 48 hours ago and they were not able to sell me a phone. To make it even weirder, I had the (unopened) phone I wanted in a bag, but it is a "locked" one from TMobile. I thought that was ancient history.
One day Apple will want my money!
In fact, I did this two years ago with the 6 Plus. I bought a T-Mobile phone from Apple because they were unlocked (at the time the others weren't, even if purchased directly from Apple) and used it with my AT&T SIM.
As a recent dad, having more than one copy of my pictures is paramount :) so I "backup" with Google Photos and OneDrive. As these services exist both in Android and iOS I feel like I could change phone without worrying too much about my pics being safe.
It's not a differentiator from the iPhone it's a marketing bite. Not a lot to pull me into this phone either.
Plus their SoCs are quite good.
(Maybe not what GP meant, but that's my own take on their hardware)
1) It is interesting to note that, different from the desktop market a decade ago, there is no monopoly by a single provider for smartphone tech. This means that the upcoming challengers try to challenge using the same tech rather than come up with something really innovative. That there is no monopoly in this space, might actually reduce the speed of innovation! These parties are happy to compete with each other on familiar grounds. To me this comes across as a gentlemen's agreement in which knights establish the boundaries of their fight. Google says: it's gonna be phones, don't be afraid we come with weapons that you're not anticipating.
2) If we limit ourselves to smartphones, what would real innovation look like? For me it's twofold: a) getting rid of the other things in my pocket. I currently carry: keys, a wallet, a public transport card, a customer loyalty card, a squash subscription card, and a driver license mainly as ID. b) never worry about charging. The former can solved by actually making use of the existing technology. The latter needs a wireless charging infrastructure that works on a distance and a few R&D years (http://www.wi-charge.com/).
As an incremental step, I'm seeing more cell phone cases with a slot to store credit cards, cash, and ID.
I know, ideally they'd be gone though.
Outside the US it is not the dominant platform. Sure, it has a good share of the market, but it's not like Apple even outsell Samsung's Galaxy range.
So far, of everything software that people have enthused about with the Pixel... none of that software shines if you only have Google Apps accounts.
Aside from the camera, why would anyone with a Google Apps account buy this?
(I'm referring to the Allo AI assistent, etc which only has limited functionality for Google Apps users, as does Now, Trips, Spaces, App Sharing, Play Music Family, etc.)
The gap from 88-92 is actually shorter than the gap between 86-89.
[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehp0sn8w04fpf2q/Screenshot%202016-...
Full Image https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#shamu? (Direct link) https://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/shamu-nbd90z-factory-9...
Over the air update https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/ota#shamu (Direct link) https://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/shamu-ota-nbd90z-78a93...
Hm, does it even still get updates? The last official image posted by Google is from end of 2015. https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#occam
- First released: October 31, 2013
- Last feature update: Marshmallow: October 5, 2015
- Last security update:
According to Google[1]: Nexus devices get security patches for at least 3 years from when the device first became available, or at least 18 months from when the Google Store last sold the device, whichever is longer.
So, worst case scenario: October 2016 is the last security patch. We might get more, depending on when the Google Store last sold the Nexus 5, but I don't know when that was.
[1] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_device...
I don't have any hard figures but my recollection suggests Google supports their phones longer than Apple typically does the iPhones. Plus you have the option of open source images like cyanogen when google finally gives up on it. I'm not sure about the nexus 5 now that they just released android 7, but the nexus 4 is the only one that isn't on android 6 at the moment. They are currently in the processes of releasing the android 7 images to these devices.
It's easy to make an excellent phone to retail for $700.
It's much less easy to make a good phone to retail for $300.
This means that a lot of people, probably the majority, have to make-do with sub-par, or second-previous-generation from eBay, or order something from the Chinese market.
Hence the cynicism when Google unveiled yet another $700 phone. It's like another 200 mph supercar from Bugatti, pretty to see and technically fantastic but irrelevant to the market as a whole. Next time Google, how about taking-on a challenge?
Perhaps the next iteration of Pixel will be cheaper as they ramp up on hardware expertise and reign in on cost.
But everyone in the thread is saying Google didn't really manufacture it and it's just a rebranded HTC device
Look for a third ecosystem to come out of China.
"Small" designation deliberately omitted. That's what I'd call the iPhone 1 through 4S, but it doesn't seem likely that we'll get any new ones.
I was hoping to upgrade a nexus 5 I paid 399 CAD and this year they want to charge 899 CAD for the base model!
This is insane and I just ordered a OnePlus 3 (519CAD) hoping that we'll see more competition instead of reliving the 90s desktop OS situation...
(BTW the LeEco Le Pro 3 also seemed good, has slightly higher specs that OnePlus 3.)
I got a OnePlus One when they launched (Ditched the Nexus for the first time in years). Can't say about the development experience on it but I've had some terrible experience with their Cyanogen OS.
It was fine at first, and then every single update broke something major (Like getting stuck on fullscreen video, Speakerphones not working, etc). The next update would fix it but break something else.
I decided to only stick to vanilla Android Nexus after that.. And now that's gone.. sigh
Meanwhile, iPhones have no cheap developer option either. When has developer equated with cheap?
"From $649 or $27.04/month for 24 months with Google Store Financing*"
Not that I'm defending it, but it looks like Google is moving from being a platform provider to a (for profit) device provider.
Given the endless bullshit surrounding third party vendor foot dragging, abandonment, etc., I'm not sure they had any other choice. For my part, I'm done with anything Android that isn't directly from Google (or maybe Samsung, for a phone). And even Google, I distrust, after they left Motorola and my Moto X to "rust" before I was even done with its contract/payments term.
The Moto X is still getting prompt updates, regardless of the sale, no? My Moto G does at least. Certainly no rust on it.
Until I switch away from Verizon, I stuck my already activated SIM into a Nexus 5x -- the first Nexus to work on Verizon's network.
That Nexus 5x just got the upgrade to Android 7. Because the update is shipped directly from Google and Verizon has no control over it with respect to my independently acquired Nexus 5x.
At the time I bought the Moto X, from a Motorola then owned by Google, Google/Motorola/Verizon was promising that this new ownership/alliance would ensure timely updates. Yeah... so much for that. Updates came slower, and all too soon choked out.
Treated the same, to a limit, I guess. If everyone is treated the same, they wouldn't be able to guarantee to be the first ones out with Nougat.
Let's see how short or long the lead start is they will give their own phones.
The video stabilization looked really good in the demo at the Google event [1] despite using the smartphone's gyroscope [2] to do what the camera would do if it had OIS.
[1] https://youtu.be/q4y0KOeXViI?t=55m20s
[2] http://www.theverge.com/a/google-pixel-phone-new-hardware-in...
> Though there’s no optical image stabilization, Google tied the camera to the gyroscope to eliminate the hand-shake “jelly” effect in video.
IMHO it is a damn shame to see the Nexus line replaced with such high end devices. I can't see them selling that all that well. They are priced way too high.
Apple it seems can do it for devices in those price range.
AI needs to know everything about you to truly personalize the experience and be more valuable.
Don't believe me? Here's an interesting exercise. Watch the movie Her. They do a great job of showing where these nascent AI efforts could go. Now think through on every scene what kind of device permissions and data access and tracking would realistically be needed to deliver on that.
Assuming you don't use actively use Google services (i.e. use someone else for search or email) and you say 'no' to every question about tracking during setup then as far as I'm aware the only tracking that remains is the use of the radio to collect anonymised wifi and cell location data to use for A-GPS. And I think it's possible to disable this too (although it's probably not immediately obvious where the setting is).
I guess the Play Store tracks usage but you could use F-Droid.
I'm sure there is some residual tracking after the above is taken into account but the devil is in the detail. Is it anonmymised or personal? Can you view and potentially delete it via your Google profile?
I'm genuinely interested as my privacy is a cost/benefit tradeoff and I want to make an informed decision rather than accept hand-wavey "everything you do is tracked" claims.
I can't justify spending $650 on the newest phone for a slightly better camera.
My current iphone 6 is just fine, the battery is waning but not unbearably so.
Does the pixel offer anything that justifies the price? Or would a consumer be better off just purchasing an older generation smartphone?
Also, hard to quantify, but there was an element of social cost in that every knew I no longer using an iphone because the texts weren't blue. HN tends to dismiss such things but branding/advertising are important to perception of value, like it or not.
So maybe it's more like a premium priced iPhone 6s or so. Outside of Apple's ecosystem. How in the world would that be a "real threat"? The 32 GB Pixel is expected to land at $650, the (now finally) 32 GB iPhone 6s will cost you $550. It'll cost you $100 more and it'll make you lose your ecosystem!
It looks like a method for Google to stop the drain to Apple through an alluring Apple design at best, not something that will do much in the other direction.
As an iPhone user, this doesn't interest me in the slightest, other than an "academical" interest where it's interesting to see Google finally seeing the light. Now let's see if Google will introduce a certification program so people can look at a label in the specs of any Android phone and know that the smartphone will not be loaded with crap. Let the OEM's be still free to do it, but let people have an easier time to vote with their money.
Google will never, and I mean NEVER, be able to compete with Apple on fit and finish as well as the all round user experience with which Apple are able to justify their seemingly outlandish pricing.
If anything, people will now scrutinize fit and finish even more closely at this price range and that's the last thing they need.
If pixel is completely replacing nexus, then it's a complete bummer, as one of nexus' best points were very good hardware in reasonably good package for half the price as flagship competition (galaxy, iphone). OTOH, it's maybe a good business move if they manage to take galaxy users to buy pixel, Google will make a good buck for it.
I still dont understand why Google didn't keep pushing the mid-range nexus. They were onto such a sweet spot.
Has Google promised the carriers don't get to interfere this time?
It's the same as Nexus phones, carriers did not interfere with them.
JDM: joint device manufacturer
OEM: original equipment manufacturer
EMS: electronics manufacturing service
I've only heard bad things about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY
This phone isn't going to kill the iPhone - in fact it would take a big screwup on the part of Apple for people to start migrating away from its products. Not that Apple is incapable of screwing up, but so far they've sailed their ship pretty well.
Apart from the hardware, there's the whole ecosystem of app developers, programming environments, cloud services.. Ultimately it's about who can attract the more talented developers - and that is a lot more difficult than snapping a faster CPU or better camera in your phone.
In the Google Store.
However, availability in 5 countries? Google, you want to take on iPhone with that? Apple phones are available globally. Even with previous Nexuses, they were available in many countries because the manufacturers did sell them, not because Google. Google sold them only with few countries; even in EU, they bothered only with about 14 of 28 (depending on product).
Thankfully, for only $649, you can get the 32 GB version, which has the same storage capacity as the Nexus 5 released in october 2013. Oh yes, the Nexus 5 was sold for $150 less.
There isn't any indication that these phones will be any less developer friendly than the Nexus phones, if you don't have a problem with the price.
I really, really, really want a good phone with hardware keyboard.
Even better if the dialer is not a common app, and is something you can access immediately even if the "user OS" crash.
(comment copy-pasted from https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Pixel-smartphone-camera-revi...)
At $649, it's in iPhone 7 and Galaxy S7 territory.
It doesn't have an impressive curved display like the Galaxy S7 Edge so the 5.5" Pixel is likely to be larger than a 5.5" Galaxy S7 Edge.
The Snapdragon 821 is probably the best processor they could get, but it doesn't stand up well against an iPhone 7 (or even older iPhones on common tasks like web browsing). So, that doesn't bring anything impressive to the table that I couldn't get before.
Google has just said that the display is "Hi-Definition" in their presentation slide. Looking at one of their videos, it looks like 441ppi on the 5" which means 1080p and 534ppi on the 5.5" so the 5.5" matches the S7 Edge, but the 5" is a lesser display than the Galaxy S7. Not sure it makes much of a difference, but it doesn't best a competitor at the same price.
The Galaxy S7 and many other devices come with 4GB of RAM.
There doesn't seem to be anything in this device that's so exciting with the possible exception of the camera. But how much of that is software? The DxOMark review notes that "Pixel’s biggest innovation is an enhanced version of Google’s HDR+ multi-image capability. . .the Pixel pushes the capability further than we’ve seen before". So, is this simply software that Google is going to keep proprietary in order to sell its device? That's certainly fair game, but it points to exclusive software, not hardware being the draw.
Unlimited photo and video storage is nice, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the device. That's just google offering an exclusive service with purchase.
To me, it mostly looks like what I can get in competitive phones, maybe with some exclusive software. It's not faster (constrained by the best Qualcomm can muster). The camera is marginally better than an iPhone 7 (though no word on the iPhone 7 Plus). The display is competitive with or worse than a Galaxy S7 [Edge].
I think Google has a better chance if they start developing their own chips as the article alludes to. Apple has a large single-code speed advantage that's particularly noticeable on the web (https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/775777790494846976).
The Pixel looks fine, but it doesn't have something amazingly impressive. It's good, but nothing that truly makes me think that Google has outdone itself. If I were in the market for a new Android phone, I'd consider it. But the OnePlus 3 seems to have most of the same in a much cheaper package. The Galaxy S7 Edge seems to have a cooler package for much the same equipment. Plus, I guess my concern is whether Google is going to care about the Pixel phone 9 months from now. Maybe this is a huge new push. But OnHub seems to be abandoned for this new Made By Google thing after a very short time and generally Google has a bit of a history of not caring about things that don't immediately gain traction. So, maybe a couple years from now it'll look more attractive.
EDIT: looking at the specs, it's 8.5mm thick at the thickest which is how they avoid the camera bump compared to an iPhone 7 at 7.1mm thick.
EDIT 2: I'm very glad that Google is getting into the hardware game. I think they can create great devices and help push the industry forward. I think competition will be great for consumers. I think there are lots of areas (like WiFi) which need to be made better. But it's hard to beat the best smartphones with your first model. I'm glad Google is creating a phone, but smartphones aren't low-hanging fruit to create something remarkably better.
But then... Google dropped updates for this phone after just 18 months and the microUSB crappy plastic connector started to fall apart and don't charge. It seems that now Google is selling premium hardware (finally), but what about software updates? I get about 4 years of updates on an iPhone now, who knows what are the plans for this Pixel.
It won't sound like mono.
Maybe we'll actually start seeing Tizen headsets from Samsung.
A lot of things like connecting to a public WiFi (which tries to connect to a Google page which doesn't work), Google PlayStore, Google Maps, email apps, etc.
In China you need an Android that doesn't come preloaded with Google stuff or an iPhone which just works fine incl the AppStore.
It's very strange that Google doesn't offer at least basic support there.
Because their goals are different, Apple and Google can both win in Mobile. Android's success hasn't stopped Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world and Apple's success hasn't stopped Android serving many market segments Apple has no interest in addressing. As consumers, regardless of which platform we prefer, we've all won.
Think now would have been a good opportunity to go for something less rounded. An iPhone 4 style sharp design would probably end up looking futuristic next to all the faceless rounded blobs the market is full of.
Interestingly, on the order page they don't even ask you what carrier you're on. When I've ordered iPhones from Apple they usually ask if you want the Verizon model, the AT&T model, the Sprint model or the TMo/unlocked model.
Wonder if this means it's finally a non-issue and if so, why they didn't bring this up in the keynote as it's at least as much of a perk as some of the other techie details they mentioned.
One reason is that VZW structures the phone price into your bill. So buying directly from Google costs more than getting it through them. (They don't lower your bill for not using the phone upgrades.)
Is or has there been any way I could purchase a new phone assign it my number and have 2 phones ringing at same time? I would have a side by side comparison in each pocket?
Like I buy pants. But 4 at the store and return 3
I assume I need a service provider.
In reading this I like my current phone but it would be cool to try this.
Maybe I'll just hold out on my Nexus 5 for a couple more years...
Vertical integration FTW.
Fortunately, I'm not feeling the need to replace my Nexus 5X yet. Maybe next summer when the Moto G5 comes out, I'll see if it's worth switching -- or maybe I'll wait until 2018 and get a Moto G6, but I'm not getting a Pixel.
And if some key apps I use ever end up getting ported to Windows 10 Mobile, I'll consider Microsoft for my next device. But that'll be a ways off: I rely on Lyft to get around, so I can't use a phone that has no Lyft app.
After using Android for a few weeks I would be pretty happy using it instead of IOS. Among top tier apps and Google provided apps it's definitely now on par with IOS. $59 for a phone is unbelievable.
I just got my iPhone 7 and while it's a great phone and has a slightly higher build quality, it's more than 10x the price.
> Pixel comes in two sizes, 5” or 5.5”, and three colors: Very Silver, Quite Black and our limited edition for the U.S. only, Really Blue.
What's your problem Google? You keep being the only big company still pulling this "U.S. only" stuff.
I bet Americans don't care much if blue is available in other countries or not, for the rest of the world is a tiny "because fuck you, that's why".
I'm happy now that the prices are too high, otherwise I might be giving them my money :-)
Edit: Ah, I was mistaken. Contract exclusive, still outright.
Oops!
> We’re also offering Pixel unlocked on the Google Store and, for you Project Fi fans out there, you'll be happy to know that Pixel is the latest device to work on the Fi network.
Sorry I'm so absolutely excited.
That's funny, I thought all the ones before it were "iPhone killers". Hmmmmm.
So all non-iOS users are either deluded, misinformed or purchasing solely on price?
Why is Google still insisting (with 7.1) that the 3 navigation keys (menu, home and back) need to be on screen - either wasting real-estate or annoyingly hidden - requiring a swipe to expose them?
Old Android phones used to have hardware or software keys that were off the bottom of the screen - and in fact my Xiaomi Mi Note Pro still does - it frees the entire screen for content. If the '3 keys' regularly changed meaning I could see the need to have them 'on screen' but they don't.
I'm using the Kindle Fire a lot right now, and the on screen buttons suck - a pain to trigger, and when in a view where you have to have them all the time they eat up space, esp in landscape view. Android still feels like tablets and landscape use are an afterthought. I LOVE android, but this just really riles me, and has steered me away from android tablets for a while now.
Interestingly, no on ever figured out how to implement this trick when apps wanted to use their hardware buttons for extra screen space. I suspect this is a big reason for this particular compromise.
For example, there's an XPosed module which let's you swipe to the right over the navigation keys to change them out for music controls. If you swipe to the left, you can access some apps that you've pinned there as well as quick-toggles for system settings (such as WiFi on/off).
iPhone: I want direct filesystem access and 3rd-party app stores, app sideloading, etc. Also, to not have to re-purchase the apps I already have.
The smaller Pixel is more interesting to me than either the Note 7 or iPhone 7. Of course, I've got a weird combination of requirements for phones, and they go against the direction that most of the market is headed, so I'd have to agree that these aren't likely to make a huge dent in the market. They're phones I'll be considering for my next upgrade, though.
BTW, this is another con for the Pixel a 5" is a DOA for most users these days.
I feel the same way about phones. 5"+ is usable, but only with an uncomfortable degree of strain in my hands. I honestly don't see why the "bigger is better" mindset rules the market. I just see that every decent handset out there is a usability compromise.
Thank you for pointing out the S7, though. It's only slightly larger than my current phone, and it would be near the top of my list if I were to go out and buy a new one tomorrow.
Haha, what? Google already thoroughly beat the iPhone: they made Android. This is just a ridiculously overwrought way to say "Google is making a new phone".