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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

As always the most compelling thing about the phone is Google's support - fast releases and minimal carrier bloat. You have a nice list of positives and I'm not disputing them.

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.

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> 4 GB of RAM is barely adequate

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).

> I've never owned a phone with more than 2GB of RAM and I'm not sure what I'm missing out on.

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.

I would be shocked if RAM and not GPU were the limiting issue in a phone running VR.

Its October and you are still playing anything from Niantic?

>> I've never owned a phone with more than 2GB of RAM and I'm not sure what I'm missing out on.

> 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.

Are your recent 2GB phones iDevices?

> Including a smoking camera but no optical image stabilization? Make up your mind - is it a digital camera competitor or not?

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...

>Why does it need OIS if its EIS produces a stabilized image better than anyone else's image stabilization?

That's a fair point. If it indeed does produce a great image I have no complaint.

Your link only talks about video stabilisation, it doesn't appear to even try and examine still image stabilisation and if it is superior to OIS as you claim.

Do you have a link that supports the claims made above? That one simply does not.

> it doesn't appear to even try and examine still image stabilisation and if it is superior to OIS as you claim.

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.

But DXOMARK! The camera metric we've been relying on to buy our phones! Its the highest score ever! Think about how relevant the incrementally better lens will be. Wait till your friends read the EXIF data on your Facebook and FOMO at the mouth. "I saw the DXOMark for that lens" immediately escalating your life from the mundane to the exciting.

Innovations in photon capturing technology like light field be damned. This is the best.camera.ever.

Did this not factor into your decision?

> As always the most compelling thing about the phone is Google's support

You mean support for the OS, not for the hardware, which is probably more of a concern for phone users.

"4GB RAM in a phone is barely adequate"

You know, I knew the day would come that we'd be saying this unironically, but in still surprised it's here.

The only other Snapdragon 821 is the Mi5s Plus, and that has either 3 or 5 GB of RAM.

Doesn't the iPhone 7 have only 3 GB of RAM? If 4 GB is "barely adequate" then the iPhone 7 must be pretty bad. /s

Comparing specs between iPhones and Androids is far from simple.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/12886058/iphone-7-specs-co...

Not having to support Java means the iPhone can get away with less https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12641590

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