Google Pixel: the Android iPhone you've been waiting for | Hacker News Reader

Google Pixel: the Android iPhone you've been waiting for

wsj.com

108 points_pius208 comments

I think it's overpriced. As someone with a Note 4 I don't really see m/any killer features to upgrade to. I half considered the iphone7, being waterproof is a decent feature but I'm not comfortable carrying a phone around that costs as much as a budget car in my pocket. I'd gladly miss this upgrade cycle because in my opinion we've hit "peak phone". A smartphone is a commodity item at this stage. What I do value is not having to work a day extra to afford a phone, those extra 8 hours are now mine.

There are lots of incremental improvements that eventually amount to something major, depends on how old is the device you're coming from. Compared to my Nexus 6, the Pixel XL is a major improvement.

Could you describe how major the jump is? I'm looking to get a new phone, but I'm thinking of seeing if the Nexus 6P price drops rather than going for the Pixel, as they didn't seem that different to me.

Coming for someone with the Nexus 6 as well, which i am incredibly happy with. I have wondered if it is worth making the jump and getting the Pixel as well.

Those phones are mostly the same. The Pixel XL is slightly smaller but offers a premium design and improvements in hardware, including a faster processor and more RAM.

Both offer pure Android, but the Pixel receives a handful of exclusive features.

At least for me, i believe that i will not switch phone for another year. Pixel is a bit overpriced at that range ( as iphones ). I expected it to be at least a bit cheaper.

Either i will wait a few months to see if the prices drops for the pixel or wait for the next year phone.

On the other hand, my phone is the one device that's always with me, so it's one area where I am tempted to spend a bit more. However, what I'd pay extra for is better stability and a better experience for core features rather than new features.

But two new features well worth it this round of phones: Water resistance has been a long time coming. Also hoping unlimited high-res storage for photos in the cloud becomes a standard across all vendors. I know you aren't supposed to trust these services with your precious files, but I've been a horrible steward of my own photos and I'm always out of space on the device.

> Also hoping unlimited high-res storage for photos in the cloud becomes a standard across all vendors. I know you aren't supposed to trust these services with your precious files, but I've been a horrible steward of my own photos and I'm always out of space on the device.

I, personally, absolutely refuse to use cloud storage of my photographs (or any data, really) that doesn't involve client-side encryption. Am I actually that concerned about my photographs themselves? No, not really — but it is the principle of the thing, as well as uncertainty about what the future might bring.

I feel the same way about my location history and other data. Can I guarantee that no government or employer for the rest of my life will penalise me for having attended a political meeting, a church or anything else? I really don't think so.

Once given to someone else, data can never be pulled back. None of us can know the future, and so it makes sense to be as conservative as possible about what we let go of.

Do you trust yourself to store things safely without data loss (even in the face of theft, house fires and natural disasters) more than the multi-level redundancy employed in the cloud?

Is data loss less important to you than possible leakage of your photographs?

These are the tradeoffs the GP made choices in.

> Do you trust yourself to store things safely without data loss (even in the face of theft, house fires and natural disasters) more than the multi-level redundancy employed in the cloud?

No: I encrypt my data locally, using protocols I believe/hope are strong enough, and then upload the encrypted data to cloud storage providing multi-level redundancy.

Right now, this is a somewhat painful process, since Google (quite deliberately, I think — 'Don't Be Evil' is now but a fading memory) choose not to facilitate it, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be as simple and straightforward as using the cloud without encryption.

Key management isn't really that difficult: have one master key, stored encrypted under the highest-strength passphrase one can remember, accessible using trusted client software (i.e. not something running in a browser). Done.

Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).

the only real way is to cache all that information on each device that would want to access those photos, which is doable, but it would feel a bit awkward, especially if sharing any of the data with other devices

> Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

That's the only way to view any information: it has to be downloaded.

> so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).

An client-side-encrypted photo store could easily support uploaded thumbnails (just not server-generated ones), and separate downloads for them. A client-side-encrypted data store could easily support separately-encrypted metadata, and there are some protocols for cryptographically-secure queries too.

> I, personally, absolutely refuse to use cloud storage of my photographs (or any data, really) that doesn't involve client-side encryption. Am I actually that concerned about my photographs themselves? No, not really — but it is the principle of the thing, as well as uncertainty about what the future might bring.

> I feel the same way about my location history and other data. Can I guarantee that no government or employer for the rest of my life will penalise me for having attended a political meeting, a church or anything else? I really don't think so.

>...

> Once given to someone else, data can never be pulled back. None of us can know the future, and so it makes sense to be as conservative as possible about what we let go of.

Although I struggle many a times to convey this to people in a way they would understand the implications of, this is the reason why I use SpiderOak to backup photos and other files (I do have a few dislikes about the SpiderOak backup solution and the client application). Even there, some sensitive data is actually in an encrypted volume file (encrypted before the SpiderOak client re-encrypts it). I also have multiple offline backups on external drives (though none being off-site) because I have faced data loss due to hardware failures before and I know that doing regular backups is the best way to reduce risks.

I'm also planning to move out of Dropbox, which I mainly use to store some re-downloadable content from elsewhere.

I pay for the SpiderOak service and use it on my Linux and Mac laptops - works fine.

I looked at the Android app, and I thought it had some security concerns, in the sense that using the Android app was no longer zero-knowledge at there end. Is that so?

none of this is a breakthrough of 2016, it has been around for quite a few years from multiple manufacturers / service providers

Might I humbly suggest going camping, without your phone? The right beach is an amazing place to do this, the right time of year. You might discover why 8 hours can be so precious.

Depends how long it takes to get to the beach.

Agreed. Watched the Pixel announcement, looked at the price, bought a Nexus 6P. Nothing in there that excites me hardware wise and a quick look at the Nexus subreddit yesterday noted that most of the software improvements are available on 6P anyway.

Edit: And what I really wanted was for my LG G4 to actually be fixed rather than for the retailer to give up and give me a credit. Loved that thing.

The V20 looks like LG finally getting their stuff together, too bad they want an arm and a leg for it.

You may never see this now, but for the record the reason I didn't get a V20 was because LG refuses to tell Australians when we're going to get it. It's like they're stuck in the 90s with their distribution model.

I check my comments often for replies since there are no notifications on HN.

LG treats both the V10 and V20 the same way. They're absolutely retarded to do so by treating the international market that way. I live in Uruguay, a third world south-american country and people sure love their phablets, with Galaxy Notes everywhere. Yet the V10 didn't see the light of day here and there are no news about the V20.

I just did the same thing. The 6P is still an incredible phone despite its age. Plus the Pixel may not handle OTA updates with rooting as seamlessly as the 6P.

I think (hope) we've hit the "peak phone" argument in that phones now are as flashy and hyped as they're ever going to be. Hopefully we'll see superfluous features and sparkles fade away as people start to want something that feels like a more natural extension of their person.

Her (2013) executed this well -- the in-universe "phones" looked natural and offered the same functionality as our current top-of-the-line models. (Of course, this was in a world where voice recognition and ML were more refined, but that's even more off-topic.)

I am in the same position. I have a Note 4 and I am not sure what a Pixel or iPhone 7 would really get me as far as hardware goes.

I like Google Now, and I use it with location turned on when traveling, but for regular life I tend to keep the Note 4 more in "privacy mode", as much as possible. I watched Google's Pixel presentation, and it is tempting to go all in, forget about privacy, and use their vision of a Star Trek style computer/personal assistant. But, I can't get past my privacy concerns.

As a previously happy note 4 owner (until I managed to lose it) - I agree. The waterproof part is nice though, which is why the Sony Z3+ is still such a nice phone IMO. I get my note-fix on a Surface 4 Pro - and it it's much more of a notepad/sketchpad - so I can settle for a phone that is a little less comfortable to use as an ebook reader, or as a notepad.

An iPhone 7 costs about $750 and lasts about 2 years. That's about $7,50 a week. How do you have to work a day to afford $7,50?

If my current phone, that cost me 750, runs for four years that halves the total weekly ongoing costs to 3.50.

I take it you don't use your phone as a primary camera and/or have kids then? The camera alone is enough of a selling point to me. Having high performance internals in a reasonably sized package with constant android updates are all just icing on the cake.

I'm sorry for fixating on this a bit, but I'm confused. On the one hand you say you're not comfortable carrying around something that costs as much as "a budget car", on the other you say you're happy to not have to work an "extra eight hours" to afford the thing.

If you can earn enough to buy a new iPhone outright in eight hours of work, then 1. I think a "budget car" might be just a tad more expensive than $1000, relative to your income and 2. carrying around eight hours of work in a product that you will use every day for two years isn't a leap, is it?

I'm just confused because I'm coming up empty when I imagine the Venn overlap of "people who earn $1000 in 8 hours", "people who are concerned about carrying $1000 on their person", "people who price a budget car at $1000" and "people who derive small enough value from upgrading to the newest device that they'd rather have an extra day's worth of income."

Did I misunderstand you somewhere?

>I think a "budget car" might be just a tad more expensive than $1000, relative to your income.

My income is in no way connected to what constitutes a budget car.

>carrying around eight hours of work in a product that you will use every day for two years isn't a leap, is it?

Yes it is if my current phone already does >90% of what this phone does.

You seem to think you have to buy more expensive things as your income increases. This is luxury creep and has disastrous consequences. I have a long term view and don't intend to work for all of my life.

It's nice to see Google totally nail the hardware and overall experience. The camera sounds impressive.

The problem for me is that the $700 phones aren't twice as good as the $350 phones. The midrange (or low-high-end) has got good enough that I can't justify doubling the expense.

I've got a LG G4 with a faulty mic due to water damage. If I can't repair it I'm seriously considering buying another one because I can't see anything else as good at that price point and nothing that makes me want to spend more.

LG phones are one of the most repairable out there. Could easily taken it a apart and replace the mic yourself.

Which is nice because it will need to repaired often (bootloops suck)

- No replaceable battery

- No SD card

- Only 2 years updates

- Same price range as the iPhone

No, that isn't what I was waiting for.

I'm with you. I'm really unclear about why this is exciting to people... it seems like an iPhone that runs android.

> I'm really unclear about why this is exciting to people... it seems like an iPhone that runs android.

That's exciting to me. There are some people who highly value Apple's HW engineering but don't want to deal with the closed ecosystem.

Except iPhone has 5 years updates.

And since when is android an open ecosystem ? Ever since iPhones and iPads started supporting sideloading [1] there is zero difference.

http://osxdaily.com/2016/01/12/howto-sideload-apps-iphone-ip...

I tried an iPhone for a week and went back to my old beater Nexus 4 because the notifications were so painful.

I much prefer vanilla Android to any of the carrier OSes.

To finally have that in hardware that rivals the iPhone plus has some interesting VR capabilities is pretty compelling to me.

Painful how? Too many or..?

I have 3 Gmail accounts and receive mail constantly. I also hate the Mail app on iOS.

On Android, there are a few key behaviors for me...it groups mail notifications by mail account, it lets you hold down to see the sender/subjects of the first few for each notification bar, and it only buzzes to notify you on the first email of each account. For that last one, I need to know when my inbox is empty if I receive something for work because it might be urgent. Unfortunately, the iPhone owuld buzz for literally every single one, and the Gmail app had no way of configuring it like Android.

Also don't love the fact that I don't have my widgets like I do on Android--they just don't compare.

This reminds me of the infamous slashdot post about the iPod right after it was first announced:

> . No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

That sounds like your typical slashdot comment. By the law of large numbers, one of them is bound to become infamous.

That comment was from CmdrTaco, the guy who ran Slashdot back then. So more significant than some internet rando.

The law of large numbers establishes convergence (in probability or almost surely, depending on which version you choose) of the sample average to the population mean. This implies what you are saying but the simpler argument is just that if each /. comment has probability p > 0 of becoming infamous, then the probability of more at least one of n comments becoming infamous is 1 - (1 - p)^n -> 1.

I was not an early fan of the Ipod. I was already on my 2nd generation of MP3 player at that point. I wanted SPACE. I wanted to be able to carry all my music with me. I have never been able to do that. The best I have at this point is the ability to stream all my music. But that requires an internet connection and unlimited data. Additionally, I found iTunes to be atrocious--still do.

I will say I have an ipod nano that is about 10 years old that is useful for when I am working outside.

People harp on that line, but in retrospect it was spot on. First generation iPods were slow sellers and little more than a novelty/fashion accessory.

Remember that when it came out the killer feature (iTunes Music Store) was still 2 years and two hardware revisions away. What you had was a very expensive player that tethered you to a Mac if you wanted to load music.

That said, it had a significantly better user experience than contemporary competitors, but that's mostly because MP3 players back in 2001 were universally horrible. People sold devices with 8 Megabytes of storage for the music, and horrible DRM laden monstrosities for managing the music (see: Sony) that made them just miserable.

The iPod had basically 2 big wins: It had enough capacity to store a reasonable amount of music and a well designed interface. Certainly nice, but not enough to make your average person shell out the $400 Apple demanded for one.

The iPod wasn't a huge hit until the price came down and the iTunes Music Store gave people an easy way to get music for it.

"That said, it had a significantly better user experience than contemporary competitors, but that's mostly because MP3 players back in 2001 were universally horrible."

I love how people forget devices like Creative NOMAD, Archos Jukebox, etc. when recalling the past of Apple changing everything in personal media players. It is the same with ignoring the LG Prada when talking about the iPhone. Just stop it.

As a Mac user since 2001, what originally sold me on the 1st/2nd gen iPod was it had the capacity of the larger players without being the size of a game gear.

They definitely weren't the first and they really didn't catch on until they marketed the crap out of it and introduced the 3rd gen with USB connectors. The firewire 1st/2nd gen wouldn't even work on a lot of windows machines because they usually had 4 pin firewire or didn't supply enough power.

Funny thing is, the 1st/2nd gen had the best syncing experience by far! iTunes would sync as fast as that little 1.8" hard drive could handle, and there was a storage mode. -shrug-

No sdcard at least is pretty much a choice by google.

As a dev I would really like to see them disappear.

Just put enough memory in these phones by default and people won't have to use a shitty sdcard

Who uses SD card anyway? I mean seriously pretty much everything is cloud hosted now days, so 64-128GB is not enough?

The Pixel is 32 & 128, and +$100 for the 128GB option. A MicroSD card does not cost $100, and offers far more space.

What do you need the space for?

pictures? music?

not everyone wants to pay hundreds of dollars to host stuff someplace else, wait for it to sync, run the risk of being lost/destroyed, and paying even more if/when data caps are broken (or paying even more for 'unlimited' data).

Photos, videos, maps, and other data, all accessible while not online as in some places being reliably online with a fast enough link is expensive or completely impossible.

You could carry a laptop to archive the data off to I suppose, but that makes the arrangement a lot less conveniently portable if you didn't already have to cart that with you for other reasons.

I have over 1 TB of music, and on my current HTC One M9, I keep a 128GB SD card in it, onto which I've thrown about 90 gigs of my most listened to music. It's still not quite enough for everything I'd like to have in there, but I just bought a 200 GB card that was on sale yesterday, so that should help.

Photos would be another reason. Particularly since Google has been ranting about how high quality their camera is.

Yeah, even with "unlimited cloud storage" they only store the original quality of photos for the amount of space you pay for, past the initial few GBs.

I thought that limitation was gone for pixel users?

I'd love to have my 60-70 gigs of music on board my phone and available at all times, not just when I have good cell coverage or wifi.

Also, when I visit Canada, data is suddenly super expensive.

What's more, I'd like to have all my GPS maps available offline. It's very difficult situation when I've traveled to some out of the way place where I have no reception, and can't load any maps to navigate me home.

Keep in mind that the OS eats, IIRC, 10g-ish of that supposed 32. And you'd better keep another couple g free for OTA updates. So you're now down to more like 20g of useable space. On a phone that shoots hd video.

Me personally: a 4g spotify cache so I don't burn through data, cached maps, lots of pics and video, and I'm constantly dealing with out of space warnings.

MicroSD card is also extremely slow compared to phone memory. I would have paid $100 to get my Samsung phone with 128gb if they offered it vs the 128gb sd card I have.

Aren't modern type 10 MicroSD cards plenty fast enough to serve up video? How much faster do they need to be, and what applications would require it?

I thought RAM (typically 2 or 4 gigs these days on most phones) is where the fast computation takes place, whereas the non volatile memory merely emulates disk storage.

They are worlds slower than phone memory. It's like usb stick vs Sata 3 SSD.

Almost everyone that I know that isn't comfortable putting private data available for the world to see when there are security exploits.

Also, not all of us live in areas where the Internet is available 100% of the time at cheap connection rates.

And considering that many of these Pixels are going straight to the Fi network...I'd rather keep media on the device than pay $10/gb to retrieve it.

Seems like that's what WiFi is for?

> I mean seriously pretty much everything is cloud hosted now days

You're really OK with cloud hosting? Why? Do you have a quota? I do. 2GB a month.

> 64-128GB is not enough

No? Not really? Not when some apps think it's OK to be 10s to 100s of MB in size? Not when I care around detailed off-line maps of a majority of the US. Not when I care around a a good portion of wikipedia offline. Not when I use my phone as an impromptu camera. Not when I want to carry around a large variety of music so that I can listen to what when I'm in the mood.

I mean 128GB is getting there, but it would be nice to be able to expand that, or start with a budget phone and expand it. Or, be able to swap cards if I'm on a long trip with various documents on one or the other.

I can compress my music collection down to mp3 and get almost all of it onto a 128GB SD card. It's nice to have.

MP3 works out to about 1MB/minute. That's 128,000 minutes of music, or about 2133 hours, or 133 days if you listen to music 16 hours/day, every day.

Are you sure you want that much music to lug around?

It doesn't weigh any more.

The point is that it's nice having the full selection available, and to not have to worry about streaming and compression quality, which I don't always have control over. Deciding which music should or shouldn't be on the phone is a task I'd like to minimize, as well.

I have some 50 cds in lossy ogg atm, but just because I haven't gotten around to break out my backup hds and get the rest on there. There are few things more annoying than audio stuttering and stopping due to intermitted wifi/4g coverage - having the option of a 128gb sd card (presumably one that I can double in a few months if needed) is great.

Sure, when you have access to good wifi, with a good back-end connection, "the cloud" is nice. But try living a week without wifi, with spotty 4g, and all that old resentment to having the only copy of your data somewhere you can't easily get at it comes flooding back. Not to mention if you go somewhere without 4g, but still want some music in the evenings.

Can't tell if you being sarcastic. If not:

A) Charging an extra $100 for a little extra local storage is the biggest scam in technology right now, some are worse than others, but anything less than a TB for $100 is infuriating.

B) 64-128GB is not nearly enough for the ridiculous resolution the cameras work at, especially video.

C) Not everyone wants their stuff in the cloud.

> but anything less than a TB for $100 is infuriating.

1 TB SSD cards cost ~$300, and at that price I don't think they'd even fit in a smartphone. So if you get infuriated that you don't get 1 TB for your $100, you really need to work on your expectations & anger level.

Nearly all manufacturers are moving away from removable storage in phones.

For the majority of users, it complicates things, and can lead to nasty edge cases if they don't understand it.

Note that iPhones have never offered removable storage.

Also, SD cards can often be of dubious quality. Even good quality ones would never be as good as the NVMe (or similar) SSDs now used in high-end phones.

Put it this way - for your laptop, would you rather a NVMe SSD, or a MicroSD card you bought from Amazon? One is going to have much more predictable write performance under varying conditions, and you know will last. The other, well...I know what I'm trusting my data to.

There's definitely a contingent (perhaps even larger so outside the US) where SD storage is important.

The question is whether that group is large enough to create sufficient demand for a removable storage phone beyond the desire of these companies to drive adoption and lock in with their respective cloud services.

I used to agree.

Less keen after losing all photos due to an SD card failure (SD card was a reputable brand from a reputable supplier).

I'm sure I don't have to tell you after that loss, but of course offline data doesn't render backups obsolete.

Until I get unlimited LTE traffic for free/very cheap, available all over the world, having my data cloud hosted is a lot more expensive and annoying than having it locally. Even if I shell out for a plan with a lot of included data, I still can't rely on actually having useable reception.

Google and Apple both charge $100 for an upgrade from 32 to 128 GB of storage, but a 128 GB microSD card is only $40, and prices will only go down on that with time. Five years from now, a $20 microSD card is likely to far exceed 256 GB, but smartphones with no microSD card slot are doomed to be stuck at their original size. If you've fully bought into the consumer mindset and always have to have the latest and greatest, great, but some people are still on iPhone 4s'.

The cloud (around harddrive island) is great and all, but for those times when you're out of internet range, the local mp3 collection you can actually listen to is far superior, and some people have amassed sizable collections over the years.

I don't know if it's true for the Pixel phone as well, but the iPhone has been using flash storage that's more like an SSD than traditional flash since the iPhone 6S and the iPad Pro 9.7" - they even use a miniaturized MacBook NVMe controller - and it's a great deal faster than an SD card. Most 128GB consumer SSDs sit at the ~$90 price range, which makes the upgrade price make a little more sense.

Of course the speed boost vs. an SD card might not matter to you but that's another subject.

Pixel uses UFS storage which is significantly faster than the flash storage in most phones. The Samsung S7 also has UFS. But not as fast the NVMe interface in recent iPhones.

The whole point of the different sizes is to have differentiation. It allows Apple to have a cheaper and a more expensive model. That way they have a reasonably affordable model for customers that are more price sensitive and an expensive model for people who don't really care.

These prices are not really related to flash memory prices. You pay more to have a phone that you can enjoy more.

SD Cards are nothing like internal storage that typically use high performance ssds. They are much cheaper and also much much slower than ssds.

And yet much, MUCH faster than an upload to or download from a cloud service.

And a lot more energy efficient

And for a lot of what is stored on them, like music, photos and movies that speed is totally unnecessary.

It's the same reason I still have both an SSD and HDD in my computer. I use the fast expensive storage for things that effect performance and the slower but much cheaper storage for my "bulk media" needs.

Photos, imo, are a great example of where cloud storage falls apart. High quality photos take a lot of disk space and take forever to up- and download in their native formats.

Once you overrun your local disk cache, you're SOL until those gigs of photos are moved.

Not to mention the browsing problem; thumbing through thousands of thumbnails and hundreds of full sized photos in a session is impossible with cloud storage.

There's a reason photographers buy multi-terabyte SANs and spend days backing those up online after a single shoot.

With the current gen of phones I'd say high res videos are the more painful use case. 4k video files are gigantic.

Depending on the country, SD cards may be used to share media, like photos, music, videos, etc., and to also copy media from others and play them on one's phone. Yes, it's very slow, but many people who use them don't know and don't care as much about the speed.

SD cards are also not very reliable, but again, many people who use them don't consider that to be critically important.

> Only 2 years updates

This part is simply atrocious. I am using iPhone 5s just fine with latest version ios. Google should admit clearly on their online store that they do not have wherewithal to work with Network operators, hardware vendors to keep OS updated for at least 3-4 years.

Just as a point of reference (not that you'd necessarily agree) but I still get regular security patches for my Nexus 5 which is 3 years old. It's not the same as entire-OS updates but in my time with iOS, I found that trying to run newer OS versions meant to leverage newer hardware on older devices was a generally negative experience.

I have an older iPad that ran smoothly and wonderfully when I got it but after taking enough system updates, it now run so slowly that I only use it as an ebook reader. Opening more than one or two browser tabs slows it to a crawl and I've found no real way to just flash an older system image to get it back to a more usable state.

At the same time, security updates are crucial so I do want to have those. The setup where I can get security patches every month or so but keep running a base OS version that the hardware can handle is ideal. Again, this isn't quite the same as the Nexus 5 is only 3 years old but it still runs surprisingly well with only major slowdown if I'm switching between lots of running apps due to memory limitations.

I guess my point is that in some cases, it's more important to get the core security updates (which Nexus has a fairly good track record of) than the latest bleeding edge OS features. May not be as good as a device that seamlessly runs the latest and greatest for 3-4 years but I find that after a point, you can't really use those newer features if your hardware is outdated so it's been less of an issue in practice for me.

FWIW, all supported devices on iOS 10, even the oldest models, run without slowdown in my experience. I agree that hasn't been the case in the past.

My wife has an iPhone SE and it's performance under iOS 10 has degraded significantly.

There seems to be something wrong with your wife's phone. The iPhone SE uses the same hardware as the 6S which is plenty to run iOS 10 flawlessly. You should reset the device and start fresh.

It's just marketing. People latch onto the 2 years + 1 year of security updates, but drop the second half of the sentence. Google could have just said 3 years of updates and just had an asterisk to describe 2 + 1 years.

The last supported OS version on a given iPhone version runs like a pig. iOS 9 is noticably slow on an iPhone 4s, and iOS 10 on an iphone 5-no-'s' is no exception, so I'm not sure how much that fifth year of support really counts for.

Also, many parts of Android are updated through the Play store, and support libraries exist. The comparison is unfair, a Nexus 4 is still very usable today.

Wouldn't it actually depend on when you buy the phone? If I buy a Pixel in one year (just before the "Pixel 2" is released), presumably I will still receive the two years of updates...

Alternatively, if I buy the Pixel on it's release date, is it safe to assume I will receive 3 years of major updates + 1 year of security updates?

Unfortunately, Android devices will likely never see significant support past 2 years because of the Linux kernel. The maintainers of the Linux kernel are openly hostile to maintaining ABI and API compatibility with drivers which is necessary to allow binary blob vendor drivers to work with newer kernels. Ideally this should encourage vendors to simply open source their drivers and integrate them upstream into the kernel. However, in practice it means that most phones are stuck with whatever kernel they shipped with pretty much forever.

Personally, I'd like to see Google switch to a BSD-based kernel, at least as an alternative option. Most of the interesting parts of Android live far above kernel space anyway.

Not waterproof/resistent

Sounds like LG V20 works better for you. It has replaceable battery, SD slot, and higher price than the iPhone!

Wow, that's a pretty nice phone. $770, though.

No water resistance. $200 more than the last Nexus phone for no apparent reason.

The price was always one of the most compelling factors in the Nexus line (at least around Nexus 4/5).

Yeah. I Went from a Galaxy Nexus to a Nexus 6 -> Never understood why people though Nexus's were "affordable" (I think the 4/5 pricing was more the exception rather than the rule).

To be fair, you can use something like CyanogenMod to extend the life of updates beyond the natural lifespan.

CyanogenMod still supports the 10/2013 Nexus 4 in 2016.

> - No replaceable battery

Here's hoping the Note 7 fiasco teaches something to the phone manufacturers regarding the convenience of replaceable batteries.

I was initially unimpressed by the phone...however after reading/watching the Verge review about it[0], I'm considering it as my next phone (but I'll probably get in a bit later when they have better deals on it)

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13304090/google-pixel-pho...

You should also give the Ars Techinca review a shot.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-b...

"However, in my short few days of testing, using the smaller Pixel, I never approached the 13 hours or so Google claimed for most activities...Google couldn’t explain my results."

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13310942/walt-mossberg-pi...

I'd wait on the full picture about battery life. It seems Android is still plagued with inconsistent and unknown battery life issues.

Nah, still too big. If there's a Pixel Mini in a year and a half when I'm looking to replace this SE, then we can talk.

But let's be honest, the product line is a lot more likely to go Pixel -> Pixel 6 -> Pixel 6R -> Pixel 6 Max -> Pixel 7 -> Pixel One -> Pixel X or some nonsense like that.

Pixel Nexus? ;)

A sub-pixel would be amazing

As a Nexus 6 user it's not big enough and I dread the eventual shift back to a smaller device. So far the Pixel's features and cost aren't compelling me to switch. Particularly since I'm also a Fi customer and their punitive data rates prevent casual photo uploads.

My basic use test is activity based: would I take this phone cycling, kayaking, to the beach, etc? Hell no. At a minimum it would need a drybox and I'd be afraid of triggering a costly moisture-related repair to a $900 phone due to some wayward sweat or water.

Ive taken my nexus 6p and previously my nexus 5 on long cycle rides, exposed them to rain, and spilled liquids on them without issues. Phones these days are pretty water resistant, just don't submerge.

I have two phone requirements: stock Android and <5" screen. The Pixel comes so close. If it were cheaper, I would compromise on the screen size. As it is, I just bought a new battery for my 2013 Gen 1 Moto X for $5 instead.

My God I love that phone. It's my favorite phone I've ever owned (and I've had several iPhones and several Androids).

I broke mine. Sad, sad day.

I bought that phone in 2014 with a broken screen and was intending to repair it and flip it. I ended up keeping it. That phone was amazing. Voice commands just worked so well. When I was driving and issued a command it would know I was driving and therefore enable the speaker. It also supported what Google now terms "trusted voice"(lets me issue command when locked and it would do it only for my voice alone), something that my Nexus 6 doesn't and for no good reason since the Snagdragon in it supports this.

Its too bad the replacement screen crapped out

Maybe someday professional basketball players will stop moonlighting as phone designers and we'll get reasonably sized screens again.

I recently made StockDroids[1] -- it's still not much but it's a good start if you're in the market for a new phone :)

[1]: http://stockdroids.com/

This is really well done, thanks!

Very nice. Maybe add a Filter/Search field to reduce the list.

Clicking the field's name on the left will let you filter. It should be more discoverable

From my perspective and talking to people who use Android phones, none of them was waiting for iPhone comparable priced Android device. For tech people: it is just assembly of generic hardware components, this time by Google. For non-tech people: it is not an iPhone, so why it is so expensive.

I don't think Google is trying to gouge people. It could be that half million sales of a device does not give economy of scale to price any cheaper.

As an Android person (and someone who was a fervent iPhone user until the iPhone 6), I've definitely been waiting for a phone without all the usual Android carrier crapware, with a great camera, and not a phablet.

Quite excited about the Pixel

You describe the OnePlus One (cannot comment on the successors after they broke up with CM).

The Pixel seems to be a phone loaded with Google crapware instead of carrier trash - and is (I agree with the GP) far too expensive in my world if you look at the hardware alone and want to dump the 'value added services' anyway.

You get the Google "crapware" on almost any Android device. (contractually mandated by Google)

The other crap that the vendors bolt on is always on top of that.

PS: I have the One Plus Two. Great device, very happy. Good price. No replaceable battery either, though.

The OPO screen is 5.5", which is well into phablet territory (the original Galaxy Note, which was "huge", was only 5.3").

So a Samsung Galaxy S7 U variant?

Yeah but you still some amount of Samsung crapware

Wasn't that the Nexus 4 and 5?

Nexus 5's camera didn't even remotely compare to iPhones of that era

Also, Android 4.x was an awful experience (that was the point I had jumped off the iOS train)

Both tech and non-tech people can wrap their head around the idea that one can be safely dropped in a toilet and the other can't.

https://youtu.be/mOwYlhUbsko

https://youtu.be/jJOgF15LLZk

https://youtu.be/-FCNA-RwRBQ

Initial reviews seem really positive. The touch response looks much improved, and that camera is a beast. Battery life looks much better than other Android phones too.

> Initial reviews seem really positive.

Not everyone likes it though: "The Google Pixel Is Too Dumb and Ugly to Replace Your iPhone"

http://gizmodo.com/the-google-pixel-is-too-dumb-and-ugly-to-...

The main problem is: It costs way too much and delivers too little for that. To be a competitor to the iPhone at the same price point, the Pixel has to really shine. This is where it fails and is reduced to a lighthouse product for a very special, small group of customers.

"The Pixel is the first Google phone built from top to bottom"

The others were built bottom-up?

> To be a competitor to the iPhone at the same price point, the Pixel has to really shine.

This is the rhetoric going around, but I'm not sure it's really true. Sure if their goal was to instantly knock the iPhone off in one generation, but it's not. The goal is to build a really strong and compelling Google ecosystem (home, assistant, chrome, chromecast, all the services that people already use) that the pixel is simply one part of. To me, this is the real end goal, to convince you to buy a Pixel not because it trumps the iPhone on its own merit, but because it ties in with all these other things you use/want to use.

I have no idea if that vision will come to fruition, but if it does, then the Pixel just needs to be "good enough" to start taking some market share.

Yeah, the touch response, camera, and battery life may be all great -- by Android phone standards, but they still lag the iPhone.

The iPhone is the definitive smartphone. If you have an iPhone budget, you may as well buy the real deal.

The Pixel's phone was rated better than the iPhone 7's, although I haven't seen the equivalent rating for the iPhone 7+ yet.

How many years of updates will it get? I'm not spending that kind of money to only get 2 years of official updates when the iphone gets 4-5 years of support.

Two years and another of security updates.

At least another year. Nexus5 is still bring updated, already past the official date.

Nexus 5 may get security updates, but it didn't get Nougat

This is literally the context of the comment I responded to. "and another of security updates."

The issue is it's hard to imagine Apple deciding to stop making phones, it's fairly easy to imagine google deciding to drop the minor product line or stop supporting it.

As they just did to all the Nexus users, where last year's phone buyers won't get software-only features like the Google Assistant, just to encourage new phone purchases.

All the advertisements about the latest Nexus phones have always been about them being the first to get the latest and greatest uodates and yet it took them just 1 year to ditch those who bought Nexus phones last year. This is clearly a bait and switch imo.

Isn't the assistant 7.1 only? That's still coming to 6p later this year.

Why do people keep saying that Nexus users won't be getting stuff like the Google Assistant? The Long Press activation requires 7.1. That's the only thing holding it up. All Nexus phones receiving 7.1 will have the same Google Assistant that is on Pixel. You can even enable it right now if you want by tweaking a Build.prop file if you running the latest version of the Google app (just not using Long Press). You can also just access it from Allo. It's not some grand conspiracy to get Nexus users to upgrade to Pixel.

The new launcher is called the Pixel Launcher (though leaks of it called it the Nexus Launcher). Speculating that Nexus users won't be getting the new launcher is reasonable (though they can just install the APK and it works fine). That has nothing to do with the Google Assistant though.

There will be a developer preview of 7.1 for Nexus devices in the next couple of months. Having to wait a couple months to get the latest and greatest Android release after it's publically available on another phone is definitely something Nexus owners can complain about. There is nothing to suggest that Nexus phones won't be getting features like Google Assistant though.

I don't think that's true. From what I've heard and read, Google Assistant will stay exclusive only on Pixel for now. Even when the 7.1 update reaches Nexus 6P.

http://mashable.com/2016/10/06/google-assistant-not-in-andro...

I stand corrected. I just received the 7.1 developer preview for the Nexus 6P and no Google Assistant.

Is it just me or did we have a much better selection of phones a few years back? It feels like most phone are trying to mimic the iPhone and that is precisely the phone I don't want.

We used to have "hacker" friendly phones with hardware keyboards etc.

Does anyone remember the Nokia N900?

Yeah, I had basically every Motorola DROID with a keyboard. Until Google bought the company and killed off the DROID 5 which was late stage in development because "keyboards are obsolete".

The N900 was great, but I've basically given up hope for one of those. My favorite was a OnePlus One for some time - it was too big and had some shortcomings, but it was a fast phone with superb CM support from day 1.

I flirt with the idea of getting a FairPhone 2 [1] again and again, because it seems a Good Idea and they seem to encourage ports to other platforms (i.e. there were rumors about a Jolla port).

1: https://www.fairphone.com/

I kept my N900 for years and years until I finally broke down and got a Nexus 5 in 2014.

I still miss it, but it's just too outdated to be usable anymore.

We used to have "hacker" friendly phones with hardware keyboards etc.

There are some in development: https://puri.sm/posts/share-your-input-on-the-upcoming-libre..., but they may end up being niche items.

Any phone that doesn't support the eco-systems of iOS, Android or Windows is going to die, unless it offers some killer feature that manages to have enough sales to keep the company afloat.

"In most situations, I’d rather have the Pixel camera... One reason is the phone’s superior screen. The AMOLED display makes photos look better; even ones taken on an iPhone."

What? How does a better screen make the camera better?

Also, in the comparison photos, they have shown different images for the Pixel and iPhone. How can we be expected to judge for ourselves based on that?

Come on, WSJ. This is just amateurish.

> Also, in the comparison photos, they have shown different images for the Pixel and iPhone. How can we be expected to judge for ourselves based on that?

Came here to say the same thing, it's incredibly hard to judge when you have 2 different pictures. A number of site have nailed this and have the same picture taken with each phone and a slider you can pull across the image to switch between the two phones. All that to say I'm not a photographer and I really couldn't give a shit about the pictures I take. No one has ever shamed me for not having enough definition in a picture I've posted and reallyI'd be fine with a camera from 2-3 iPhone models ago.

I'm confused... there are two sets of near-identical comparison photos with that pull-slider you described between them, and to my eyes it clearly and fairly shows that the Pixel's colors and clarity are better.

Are you guys complaining about the slight differences in angle and camera placement? (i.e. as you pull the slider across, things shift a little bit) It was a little un-satisfying in the sense of falling just short of perfect, but in my non-photographer mind it's plenty close enough to see a fair comparison...

Strange... that slider feature wasn't visible the first time I viewed the site. Maybe it got added in later, or maybe it was a browser issue.

Thanks for clearing that up, it's now a very good comparison.

Thank you too, yeah, I wondered about that. Maybe they had a compatibility issue that made it not load right in your first browser or the first time you read it.

> What? How does a better screen make the camera better

It doesn't, it makes the photos you take from said camera look better than if you also looked at the photos from a crappy screen.

Not trying to step on any toes; I just wanted to explain what they meant.

> What? How does a better screen make the camera better?

According to the author: The screen makes photos look better. So if you use your phone as the primary device to view photos, and don't want to carry a second device to take them, this may be the phone for you.

For price-conscious potential buyers of the Pixel, the current used-phone market for non-Apple and non-Samsung phones are small enough that depreciation for such phones is rapid. Since Google is marketing the Pixel line as an iPhone competitor, it may indeed have sufficient demand that it depreciates closer to Apple and Samsung than to other Android phones. However, that remains to be seen.

It seems to me that limiting oneself to year-old iPhones, just after a new model is released and changing models every year strikes a nice balance between depreciation rate and usability/features.

Year-old new or year-old used?

I'm still loving my Sony Xperia Z5 compact. The phones are getting too big.

I think I'll keep my Nexus 5X for another year or two until the specs of midrange phones surpass it, and then I'll probably go for a Sony or Motorola device, probably whatever the 2018 iteration of the Xperia X or Moto G will be (I favor Sony's hackability but Moto's aesthetic). I'll be pretty bummed to have to leave Project Fi, because it's the best carrier I've ever had, but I'm not buying a Pixel, and my 5X won't last forever.

What Google is asking for the Pixel is way too much money. On top of that, I absolutely cannot stand how metal-and-glass phones feel in my hands. I have sensitive skin, and every time I've held an iPhone I feel it digging in and causing me pain. Here's the thing, though: because of the iPhone's popularity, an iPhone user who doesn't like its feel can get any kind of case they can imagine. A simple Google Image Search turns up dozens, if not hundreds, of different leather and suede cases. Searching Etsy turns up options for hand-stitched leather. You can even get an iPhone case that doubles as a stuffed animal, if you really want something soft (seriously: do a Google Image Search for plush iPhone case). The Pixel will never reach that level of popularity. It will never be popular enough for there to be even a quarter of the cases available for it as there are iPhone cases (I'm skeptical it'll have even an eighth of the amount).

I also just don't trust Google to seriously make an "appliance phone". Look, Apple is very, very good at making phones that are basically consumer appliances. Google doesn't know how to do that. They've dressed the Pixel up as one, and given it a price and a fuselage to match, but they don't have the experience, and they don't have the app ecosystem. Even their first-party apps are horrendously inconsistent with one another. The reality is that if you want an appliance phone, you should buy Apple, and if you want a hackable gadget for geeks, you should get either an older Nexus phone or buy Sony.

Why are new phones so large? I'm stuck on iPhone 5S because everything newer is so damn big.

Because people buy the bigger ones. The market seems to have established that the 5-5.7" range is where the money is to be made.

Anecdotally, 5" is pretty perfect for me, and using an iPhone 5 is a very frustrating experience.

There's the SE.

I'm pretty sure this will be my next phone as it is available on Verizon and I have to get out of the Droid Turbo trap. Having gone through three Turbos (2 Turbo I and one Turbo II) I'm strongly looking to jump away

This is an overwhelmingly positive step forward, even if it isn't up there with, say, the iPhone (which I don't think it is in terms of looks, ease of use, app ecosystem, etc) When the rush of orders dies down a bit over the next weeks, I'm going to be placing an order to replace my Turbo II.

This isn't what you said, but just to be clear to all readers: don't fall into the marketing trap. The Pixel is available for all carriers: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/psa-if-you-like-updat...

I've thought about replacing my Moto X, but the battery lasts two days. In fact I sometimes run out of battery because I forget I'm supposed to charge it.

I look at the pixel and nexus and other phones, and I see benchmarks where their battery lasts 7 to 13 hours depending on phone, and I assume those are all best case.

I never think about my phone. I think I'd think about it a lot, every day, when I got near the end of my active daytime period, or got home and realized my phone is still charging at work.

There's a user over on Reddit who is in Australia and was lucky enough to have received the Pixel XL early. He mentioned that he had low usage, about an hour a day, but is able to get to day 4 without charges in between. Others seem to be saying that two days is pretty easy with "normal" use.

Does he power down, or just not use a bunch of video/audio? My use is light phone/text, and rare email/web while standing in line (but usually I just "be" while I'm in line).

Preordered mine as a switch from Apple. Mostly because of the Daydream VR line, and I have found myself strongly disagreeing with a lot of Apple's vision. (Lack of VR, Lack of aux)

Wouldn't be surprised to see Apple unveil something similar to Daydream in the next year or two.

If you believe Robert Scoble, iPhone 8 is going to have like desktop-grade VR. Now mind you, I don't believe Robert Scoble, but the claim has been made, as if it was fact.

The Google Pixel phone makes me wish the Google Play Edition phones had caught on, because the more I think about it, the more I realize that's all I really wanted:

- The phone I want (an HTC One M7 or M8 at the time)

- No OEM bloat

- Continued OS and security updates

That's it. And unfortunately at the time it had been announced I had already purchased an M7 on-contract from Verizon, so I couldn't well get the GPE Edition.

It didn't continue, presumably because it didn't sell as well as they were hoping (though to be fair, none of HTC's phones for the past five years have sold as well as they were hoping). But I really liked that idea: rather than buying the Nexus, which has always had certain compromises (lack of SD card slot), buy the phone you want and Nexus-ify it.

After looking at the Google Pixel, I don't really want it: I'd prefer to just buy an HTC 10 that is debloated, not carrier locked, and guaranteed to get OS updates for several years.

My Nexus 5 was my favorite phone. I replaced it with a 5x but I still prefer the old form factor more. The fingerprint reader is nice and so is the camera on the 5x.

Google hit a sweet spot with the Nexus 5 in terms of price performance and form factor they haven't been able to replicate since.

LG V20 is the phone I've been waiting for but it looks like it will not be sold in Europe. :(

The V20 is also running 7.0 Nougat, and is available now, which the author failed to mention - in fact, she says the Pixel's the only one running it.

The V20 is just as horribly expensive as the Pixel.

Why is the leading contender disqualified? The Samsung Galaxy 7 is still great.. remember the burning phone as the NOTE 7 (and it's more a phablet than phone)

As an owner of a S6E: I'd disqualify those due to unremovable crapware (anything starting with S basically), crappy support for rooting/flashing the phone (ODIN, flash fuse), crappy driver support for 3rd parties (-> No CM, probably never). Touchwiz.

If you like Apple, the iPhone is great I guess. If you like Samsung, the S6/S7 series might be great. I'd definitely agree that the hardware is superb in both cases, but would disqualify these devices (in my world, for my use cases and preferences) due to software concerns.

"unremovable crapware" like... Google Play Music, Google Play Movies, Google Play Books, Allo, Android Pay, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Translate, et al.?

Touchwiz > All of that!

Short version: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I keep that although I don't use it really, no, no, yes

Different use cases and all, I guess. The first three are irrelevant in my world (and arguably should be opt in - add their Games thing to that list). You follow with yet another IM/chat/voip application. Android Pay? I'm neither interested, nor do I believe that adoption around here is high enough to use it for anything remotely serious. GMail is something I don't really use anymore, but still keep due to my mostly dormant Google account. YouTube is neat, honestly. Google Translate is something I rarely have a use for. If I need that, translate.google.com works fine in Firefox. Why would I install that as an application?

(Update: Only just noticed that you answered in my 'Samsung crapware' thread, I complained about 'Google crapware' in a sibling thread. Maybe we're actually in agreement? I cannot tell if you honestly consider Google's stuff as crap - as I do - or if this is sarcasm)

I just find it an interesting double standard where many people consider Samsung software bloat, and Google software not-bloat. Even though Google's is only there because it's contractually required, and it's equally non-removable.

Glad to hear you agree non-removable bloat is bad across the board! :)

Google's apps don't run unless you launch them.

And I can install a 'Skype stub' application that doesn't do a thing unless you start it as well.

It's still crapware, unwanted and useless. If I want anything but the Play Store (honestly.. I shudder, whenever I have to write/say that name. How can you take that name serious, ever?) itself, I can install it. Preinstalling applications is a Bad Idea™ most of the time, clutter if you're feeling nice, abusing the market position otherwise.

Why would I need Chrome on my mobile? Why is it impossible to remove it?

I don't disagree, but it's not a double standard to be more irritated by apps that get in your face and drain additional resources.

Play Services is running all the time by default. It's default configuration is to run location services, which is highly battery intensive, to report your location to Google on a regular basis... a huge privacy issue. The Play Store auto-updates all these Google apps by default, which can use a lot of data. Play Services can and does update itself even with auto-updates disabled.

It's very hard to justify Google Play Services as anything other than malware, because it has all of the primary functions and behaviors of a virus.

I don't think you void warranty if you uninstall google apps, samsung on the other hand...even if you try to uninstall apps by getting root they get installed automatically on reboot, you have to flash a new rom to remove stuff.

You can't uninstall Google Apps without the same level of difficulty of removing Samsung's apps, they both live in the system partition.

seems a tad overpriced to me. I ordered Xiaomi Mi5s for 2/3 the price

I really can't wait for a retro cell phone fad to be a thing.

Remember when you had to replace batteries instead of phones? Manually install SD cards? Type on that hard keyboard? Screens so small they didn't even fill a quarter of your man purse? Now you can live like a double naught!

Technology is cyclical.

Lot of people talking about the phone being too large and I'm sitting here wishing it was bigger.

I'd love to buy one if only I could. Still no Google products in Mexico.

Insanely over priced, design is terrible as well. Sony's latest xperia device looks pretty sweet.

Eye of the beholder! To me, the Pixel is quite a nice design, and the new Xperias look awful.

No QI wireless charging :( Dear Google, I'll keep my Nexus 5

No sd card, no sale.

I can't even read this article through the google workaround. HN should seriously consider banning WSJ.

Alternatively, you could consider paying for articles you want to read...

The question is if it's appropriate to post paywalled links on a public news aggregator. Do we want to foster a culture of paying to view the links you see on HN? I don't.

  Copy the title. 
  Perform a Google Search.
  Click the first link.
  Read full article.

You could stand to read my comment before you reply.

I did and it worked perfectly for me.

I subscribe to the WSJ and the one column I have learned to never read unless I want to shake my head at the way the modern media writes tech journalism is Joanna Stern's column. It is tech advice for people uncomfortable thinking for themselves or rightfully fearful they aren't able to keep up with changing technology.

"Hey, grown ups, have you heard about the latest thing? Let me tell you how to Snapchat like the kids are doing!"

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