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> The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint

As a tech professional who can afford to be a little fiscally irresponsible once in a while... the Pixel has been by far the best phone I've ever owned.

This is the first Android phone I feel has really challenged Apple's obsessively airtight design. I have never noticed a stutter, the camera is absurdly fast and shoots great photos, and the battery lasts nearly twice as long as my 5X.

Google has historically provided the cheaper, higher-barrier phones, but they're attempting to catch up while users are becoming lukewarm on Apple. I think they nailed it.

The battery has about the same capacity as the 5X. Are there hardware tweaks that would make the battery last longer?

I'm no hardware expert, but they must have some more intelligent CPU throttling, or something— the Pixel is also using a much newer chip (Snapdragon 821). My 5X was on AOSP, no major modifications. Pixel is on stock. The 5X would only last until about the end of the work day, the Pixel lasts me several hours longer, even with the higher display resolution.

The great scandal here, the 97' fluoro pink elephant, is that we have come to accept these devices lasting longer than a work day is good.

And that's out of the box. Batteries degrade. This time next year expect to be recharging these flagship devices twice a day.

It's terrible and I don't get it. I'm guessing most people have never had a phone that lasts a full 24-36h so they don't know how nice it feels. I had a Huawei Mate 2 and it would easily last two days. Enough that I never worried if I forgot to plug it in. Anytime I went out, I knew it'd last.

Apple's obsession with thin has probably hurt us all here. Or is there another explanation why phones don't come with large batteries?

I work in a metal fabrication workshop, my pockets and desk get covered in tiny metal particles. Had the speaker in my iPhone 4S replaced a couple times before I broke the screen and the mic and speaker and battery all gave up.

So I bought a secondhand Galaxy J1 for AU$75. It's annoyingly slow for doing anything other than sms / email / HN, so I tend not to use it for much else. But the battery like is awesome. I can get through a whole 24hr period without charging it, get to work the next before I noticed it's down to 15%.

That's just the thing though, even I've come to accept that 30hr battery life is awesome.

The iPhone 7 is 7.1mm thick, the Pixel is 8.5mm.

Who cares? I wish some manufacturer would give us a 12mm thick phone with a battery that lasted 48hrs +

On the other hand, I don't see why so many people think that battery life is so important. I charge my phone all night and almost all day at the office. If you have a desk job, I can't imagine running into battery life issues very often.

What about weekends, especially when you are taking pictures or filming your kids, and the phone dies before the sun goes down?

Not everyone sits at a desk all day every day.

I like to leave my house and do things where I don't have immediate access to an outlet that I need to stand near for 1+hr til my phone is recharged.

Ever play a game like pokemon go? Battery life very quickly be ones relevant if you are outside and away from a charger.

> On the other hand, I don't see why so many people think that battery life is so important.

Pretty simple:

1) Not everyone wants to constantly [think about] having to recharge their mobile device, or having it constantly connected. If you go hiking for a few days, you still want to be able to call 911.

2) Applications become heavier and heavier (yay all the ads, embedded browser, 3D stuff, cloud, crypto, etc). If you're on a plane and say play a game because you're bored you may end up easily using for example 40% of your total battery power.

3) The more you need to charge the phone, the quicker the battery degrades (LiOn generally keep working for 1000 recharges). Over their lifetime (that's roughly 3 years of daily recharging) the battery will degrade to less juice within a full cycle [1].

4) Batteries are not user replaceable anymore, so require a third party to perform the swap, at premium price and without full control of the user.

5) There's enough waste as it is, and having to swap phone every 2 years or so creates even more.

6) It also is quite a task deciding which phone to buy, and if you made a mistake or don't have that much money to burn you may end up with a phone not so well supported.

7) Finally, one has to swap their settings and data to their new phone. Sure, you can use clouds. They're free at the cost of your privacy...

A powerbank mitigates some of the above problems, but only so much, and they also suffer from degrading performance by age.

[1] Anecdotal example: my MBP 2010's battery had 740 cycles and is at ~88% capacity when fully charged.

Never forget the Nokia brick phones that lasted a week on a charge.

I have a huwai honor5x which lasts a full day easily.

I've had it for a few months now. It is annoyingly aggressive about shutting down apps (which makes my lastpass autofill not work, among other things).

But I paid ~$180 with no contract and though it definitely stutters at times, for my use it's been great.

My 2 year old iphone 6 is at 50% at the end of day.

I agree with this assessment. My Pixel XL is easily the best smartphone I've ever owned (2 BlackBerrys, iPhone 3G, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy 3, Note 3, Nexus 6P)

I just a pixel. My employer gave us all a free maxed-out pixel or iPhone 7.

It's good but I am surprised at the things it lacks. I had hoped it would support wireless charging because my last three Google phone (all nexuses) and my 2012 nexus tablet all had major problems with the power connector be oming loose after a year of use.

I also hoped it was at least minimally waterproof like most of the similarly-priced phone but, alas, it's not.

I'm very happy with the speed of the camera though.

> The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use.

I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.

I have a Nexus 6 (and had a 5 before that). Painfully slow lag seems to be a recurring issue with Android....

Just a counter point - I was going to recommend for him to get a Nexus 6, as a budget / value focused person I bought one new-in-box in September of last year, it's been a great phone. The battery is fine but not changeable easily.

My nexus 6 hasn't shown any slow downs etc.. I'm on 6.0.1 and using T mobile. You can pick them up now $260 refurbished or $330 old-new-in-box stock.

It's a great phone when he lag isn't bad. It's particularly noticeable when using the camera. My wife had the same phone and same issues, but I also know two people with a 6 who do not have the issue.

Completely different experience here. N6 worked fine when I bought it about a 1.5y ago, then, when updating, turned on phone encryption (can't be turned off) and it's been a painfully slow ride ever since. Camera's glitchy and veeery slow. It's been getting to the point where I'm on the brink of throwing it against a sidewalk at times ;)

The Nexus 6 camera particularly in HDR mode is nearly unusable unless your battery is > 60% and battery optimization is turned off for the camera app. Otherwise forget it. My device easily takes 10-15 seconds per photo to do HDR rendering. And you may not take another photo until the render completes. And yet I can't make myself upgrade to a Pixel because it seems I'd just be trading one set of problems for another.

There might be something stealing resources on mine, or I just have a crappy battery. Either way it's been over a year.

What I've done so far is join the Android beta program (yesterday) so I get newer versions of the OS, just in case there's a known issue that's been fixed. I've nothing to loose but my pains.

Go to the "Battery" tab in the settings and see what you're spending it on. Most likely you've installed some app that's running services in the background which eats up your battery.

I've experienced the same thing on my 5x that I did on my Moto X. Immediately after an OS update, battery life would tank. As in, dropping 10% per hour while sitting on the table idling, or about that.

I found on the Moto X that a Google service was chewing up a lot of power/battery. Upon rebooting, that service would return to being a very minor component of battery use.

The first time my 5x started discharging in similar fashion, I had a look at battery use and found the same thing. Turning the phone fully off and back on, as with the Moto X, seemed to "fix" this.

I'm not saying this is your problem. Unless you never restarted your phone after such an update -- waiting and charging my Moto X overnight was not enough to make it go away. But even if not, maybe this comment will help out someone else.

I have to agree with this. I bought mine in October a few days after it was released and it has only improved. I used to get random reboots, crashes, poor performance after a few days uptime - the various over-the-air updates solved all of these within a few weeks and the Nougat release improved performance even more. The battery life is also much the same as when I bought it - nothing special, but it can see me from 7am to 1am quite happily.

I got mine around the same time and have the exact same experience as you. Just as fast, battery still good (about same as yours), just as when I first got it.

I also have a 5X. If I'm moving, the battery runs out at about 20% an hour. I normally charge mine in the evening, so it's at 100% at midnight, about 90% in the morning, about 70% after my commute, and around 40% by the evening. It'll be somewhere in the 10 to 20% range by the time I get back home, often with the battery saver active.

During the work day, I generally only use it to check headlines at lunch. I also use it to play back mp3s over bluetooth to my motorycle helmet. The screen is typically on during the day for less than an hour.

The 5X is slower than the Nexus 5 it replaced - 50% more cores but they run slower and most apps take longer to start up. It's a mediocre device and the battery life is not good at all.

Right now, the biggest drains, after screen at 12%, are Google Play services, Android System, Android OS and Mobile standby.

I have a theory that it's Google's appetite for data that kills battery life. They make it hard to use the phone with location services turned off or in battery saving mode except when you want a location in Maps. When you want your location, it gets turned on and stays on. There's no easy way to keep it on to a minimum. I think it's a strategic goal of Google to use customer data for everything from location popularity to traffic, and they're willing to sacrifice customer batteries with nudging defaults to get there.

That's my experience with the 6P. The first few months, I used it as a phablet and didn't put a SIM card in, and battery usage was fine. Then I moved to the US, activated Project Fi on it, and battery life is horrible -- I suspect the way Fi frequency-hops between cellular providers and known open WiFi hotspots means it taxes the location services even more than if you're on a standard carrier.

Yeah, that matches my experience.

Except that when I first bought the device, in December 2015, it had GOOD battery life. I don't play games, I don't do anything but browse, use a couple of social media apps (as in, two) sometimes, try to keep the display below 40% brightness.

It rotted over time, like fruit left out on a hot day. The battery life became too gruesome to last the day.

It could very well be the massive data needing to be funneled about your commute, which Amazon product you glanced at, which jailed AMP news article you read, which restaurant you just walked out of, and all that other stuff that inspires modern dystopian fiction books and shows, that's draining the battery life.

Our dystopian information-centralized existence killed the battery life on my 5X. I'll take it.

I briefly used a 5X that I was given for free but quickly abandoned it in favor of my trusted Nexus 5 after experiencing similar issues. Despite being 3 years old (!!!) it's still rock-solid and super smooth running Nougat. I used to get a new phone yearly (if not biannualy) and the Nexus 5 is the first phone I've had where I don't have the urge to upgrade to the latest and shiniest device as soon as it hits the market.

Didn't the 5 have some recurring issue with the power button? ISTR looking at the 5 and being disappointed, but maybe I'm thinking of a different Nexus.

It may have, but I haven't encountered the issue with my device.

Listening to Spotify with a bluetooth headset is by far my biggest drain on the 5X (~40% per hour). I've come to use the jack cable more and more, and now it's okay[0]. Luckily, I'm not an iPhone 7 user.

[0] "okay" yes, but if people at Spotify would spend more time on battery and network issues than moving menus to weird places, I would be happier. Alternatives are worst, so it's just a matter of giving them money until they work on something you consider useful. As a consumer, this is infuriating.

FWIW, I have a iphone 7, and I use bluetooth literally all day listening to audio books. My battery doesn't really seem to be impacted significantly.

Me too. I initially had some lag problems with it but turned off "Power button instantly locks" and it went away, and it's been smooth sailing since (about a year).

> What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety.

We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).

But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.

The advantage of a swappable battery isn't having multiple charges worth of power on your person, it's not having to ditch the phone/potentially deal with warranty problems when your battery starts to go. It isn't about short term convenience, but removing a long-term point of failure. For people who aren't interested in shelling out for the latest device when they find their current one suits their needs (modulo hardware failures) this is (or, I guess, apparently only used to be) a selling point.

If you are looking for a hackable device with long support I would recommend Oneplus. I had 1+1 and loved it (but I smashed the screen). If you prefer smaller screen and are a bit adventurous you can try Nextbit Robin. Great design, looks like it has great support and is cheap (<$150 on Amazon).

BTW. I currently have 5X and have no problems with it.

> The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint

The price isn't even the biggest problem. Google ships the newest phone that gets Android security updates to only 5 countries: https://support.google.com/store/answer/2462844?hl=en

And no, it's not about lack of basic presence. (See Chromecast countries.)

And no, it's not about shipping batteries. (See Pixel C countries.)

I recently hit the LG G4 bootloop issue. Now that I am looking for a new phone (and looking at the pixel) I am finding defect problems pretty much in every phone out there.

I think I have come to the temporary conclusion that phones will always have problems even after several replacements. So all I can do is shrug, and ask why they cannot make phones like they used to.

There is a bug in the update process that can cause the phone to slow and drain battery like crazy. Doing a reset might clear it up. Its a pain but I did the same thing a couple of times through the various updates and now its behaving as it should for about 6 months.

Do you use Android's encryption feature? The 5X doesn't have a dedicated encryption chip, so all decryption/encryption is done with special (slower) ARM instructions. This really slows down IO.

What about the OnePlus? I'm happy with my iPhone 6S, but I would switch to that if the next iPhone isn't to my taste. A couple of my friends have it, and they seem to love the fast charge ability.

The OnePlus phones are amazingly good. I loved my OnePlus X, e.g. OLED display is stunning. I honestly think the hardware is better than Apple.

But I still switched back to my old iPhone 5. So make sure you don't find Android frustrating. (e.g. be prepared that security updates take far longer than on Nexus')

The latest Sony Xperia X Compact launched in September and sells for 350$. I dig it, and I think it's priced appropriately.

If the Pixel is a joke I can only imagine what it makes all of those iPhone 6s and 6s Plus with battery problems.

Have you considered the Nexus 6P?

I like the 5" form factor. I don't live in a driving city, so things are in my pocket and used in one hand while walking.

Someone downvoted me, I guess the phone landscape really is a fantastic one and I was wrong.

I didn't downvote your top comment, and miss phones with actual keyboards, but Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy aren't the only phone brands out there. 5" devices still exist. Devices with replaceable batteries still exist. Devices you easily can install custom ROMs on to not rely on the vendor for updates still exist. It's quite possible the combination you like isn't out there, but it's not total monoculture yet.

Samsung hardware + custom ROMs are a path I took in the past (with the S4 Active, which by the way was waterproof and had a replaceable battery, but somehow never achieved tremendous popularity).

But yeah, it's something worth thinking about. The major appeal of a phone like the Pixel is less the hardware than the vanilla aspect of the Android OS.

All another hardware vendor has to do is attempt to stay up to date, and minimize their own bloatware if that's a bottleneck in their time allocation allotment. I'm surprised no one sees that a lot of Android users clamor for a vanilla, up-to-date Android OS phone.

If you don't want a 5.7" mega-phone, your choices are basically a $100 trash phone or going without.

My 6P's battery is trash after a year and not replaceable :(

If you're brave it looks like you can replace it in only 5 steps. The caveat being that those 5 steps look very difficult, and in some cases require special tools.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+6P+Teardown/51660