Has Audio Jack! (Comparison with other Pixel 4's) - https://store.google.com/magazine/compare_pixel?toggler0=Pix...
This was actually the primary thing that kept me on a Pixel 2 for so long, since it also has a similar rear fingerprint sensor design (and I just pre-ordered the Pixel 4a today).
I can't be the only one who greatly prefers a rear fingerprint sensor to face unlock, especially in our new world order with widespread mask wearing -- but, even before! It's so much faster and less finicky.
(The new model's fingerprint sensor is also so subtle on the chassis on the phone that you can just barely make it out in the photograph of the phone's back shown on the comparison page. But if you squint, you'll see it. It's also discussed in many of the reviews.)
Why did I miss it? Because FaceID will unlock the notification area and its associated actions before I perform any action or even touch the phone.
Let’s say I get a text, my phone is on the night stand. I just look at it and it already unlocks, no reaching.
It lets you skip a step and start interacting with the screen before the phone has unlocked. Perhaps less of a big deal with the back-mounted fingerprint sensor, in that case I could interact with the thumb simultaneous to unlocking the back.
Using password managers was another big one. Instead of tapping the auto fill button, then tapping the fingerprint sensor, it was all one click. Opening bank apps, same thing. FaceID is always one less finger motion.
Mask wearing has thrown a wrench into it but Apple has added logic to quickly bring up the pin pad when it detects a face mask. Also, sometimes it seems to learn my masked face, but that’s less reliable.
I don’t know how this compares to Pixel face unlocking at all, admittedly.
And I never understood why Apple didn’t use the rear mounted fingerprint sensor. But I do understand why they think the benefits of face unlocking outweigh the drawbacks.
Some examples not related to the action of unlocking: when your alarm goes off, the noise gets quiet when you look at the phone. Also, the screen won’t time out and turn off while your eyes are looking at it.
> Let’s say I get a text, my phone is on the night stand. I just look at it and it already unlocks, no reaching.
My phone is on the table while I'm working. In order for it to see my face I have to pick it up and aim it at my face. With touch id I could just put my finger on top without having to pick it up. So much faster and more convenient.
I find that quite often face id is slow or fails, even if it only fails one out of 30 times that's still one a day and when it does it's frustrating as hell. Something that should take 0.5 seconds ends up taking 10-15. I know that sounds trivial but by the time the phone has unlocked, whatever I was planning to do is often forgotten because of the distraction of trying to get face id to work and then having to manually unlock.
And of course now with mask wearing it basically might as well not exist.
With a fingerprint sensor, the only time my phone would have any trouble unlocking would be if my finger was wet (trivial to fix and re-swipe). Face unlock fails all the time for all sorts of reasons, and is especially useless when I have a mask on (it's nice of Apple to detect masks and bring up the PIN pad without needing an extra swipe, but that's still a weak workaround). Even without a mask, I feel like the failure rate approaches 1% to 2%, which is way too much. For me to feel comfortable using it, I expect something on the order of 0.01%.
Actually I'm not even sure it's the failure rate that gets me. Even after using face unlock for the better part of a year, I still catch myself looking at the phone thinking it's waiting for my face when it isn't, and then I have to swipe up or hit the power button or something. Yes, maybe you can call these UX problems that can be fixed with software, but with a fingerprint sensor I know that when I touch it, my phone will vibrate, and I know immediately if it succeeded or failed.
I think also part of the difference is that Pixel phones have had their fingerprint sensor on the back instead of the front, like iPhones used to have. If the phone is just lying face-up on a table (and I don't want to pick it up), then having it on the front is much easier. But, in reality, I found that was rarely the case for me; usually it'd be in my pocket, or even if it was on a table, I'd want to pick it up anyway. The act of wrapping my hand around the phone would put a finger in roughly the right position to hit the sensor anyway, so it'd be unlocked and ready to use well before I was in a position to read anything off the screen anyway.
Frankly I just really don't like face unlock when compared to a fingerprint sensor.
1. Phone standby to phone on (as you describe)
2. In-phone software actions, typically, password manager or locked/private apps (banking, etc)
For case #2, I greatly prefer FaceID. For case #1, it’s a toss up for me.
Now I'm definitely holding out to see what the 5 has, because if I can get 5G connectivity, I'm willing to switch, but I won't be jumping at it if there's no fingerprint sensor.
(Mine is starting to die, between a bad screen crack and a battery that dies by 2pm.)
Face unlock is complete BS, no disagreement there.
However... has anyone actually looked into how secure those phone fingerprint readers are?
Could very well be that the reason they're pushing face unlock so hard is they know their fingerprint tech is even worse.
Recent phones I've had come close to mitigating lesser concerns for me, but decide to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at the last minute.
Basically, if the password has not been entered in X time, then you must enter the password to unlock, fingerprint not accepted.
Perfect. Except instead of letting me set X to my preferred interval (30 minutes), it seems to be hardcoded to 3 days.
Face unlock is pretty nice ... unless you are wearing a mask.
Very infuriating to type my long password then.
On the other side of the coin, fingerprint sensor is kind of neat (well I made a deep cut on my index yesterday so there are also situations where it fails haha). I wish there were both front and back sensors though. In the screen itself for the front one, otherwise the chin would get comically large.
Also when I am baking, I just want to use face unlock.
Ideally we would have both (or something better than both I guess)
Except during this pandemic where you have to wear a mask everywhere, I actually like face unlock. It's even more seamless than the finger print reader.
I care less about the removable battery - in every phone I had I was able to change it myself, tools are cheap, the only thing you need is to watch some tutorials and calm down to have your hands steady.
Expandable storage is also great. I mean, how can it even be considered "not a feature"? You can very cheaply expand your storage - e.g. in situations you run out of storage. I don't get it, what's not to like? Honest question.
It's funny how the brain can interpret the text based on your mood and bias. Feels kinda like those optical illusions that seem to rotate in one direction, until you change your perception somehow, and then it rotates the other direction.
it's a part of the spec, so they list it. it's not sad or bad or good -it just is.
for me, i want just usb-c, and no headphone port is a plus. same for sd card, same for removable battery. i thought all of those were important to me, until i realized i haven't actually used any of this in 10 years. yes, a headphone port adds just a tiny bit of thickness and weight. so does the removable battery. so does an sd reader. it all adds up, and adds a little cost. for things i don't want.
so not a feature, not advertized as one, and for a lot of people, not something they want. you do, so get the phone that suits you.
I wonder what you believe the word "feature" means.
hint: it does not mean 'spec.' for example, on a phone, lcd screen is not a feature. oled screen is a feature.
now, what is not a feature for most people may be a feature for you. just like if you like tap water, a restaurant filling your glass from the faucet may be a feature for you. which does not make it a feature.
edit: since the snowflake replying disabled replies.. no. it's more like claiming 'lcd screen' in the spec is a feature in the world of oled phones. so not a feature.
Your analogy is more akin to something like a glass back vs a hard plastic back on a phone, so maybe re-assess that.
What I've found works best for me:
- In the car I have a Bluetooth audio adapter for the aux in my older car. Works great.
- In my backpack I have a pocket where I always leave a headphone adapter. I always put it back if I use it.
- Bluetooth to Aux adapter with a small battery. Costs like $20 on Amazon and also lives in my backpack. Has saved my ass many times.
Beyond that, I just own more Bluetooth headphones and I keep a few space headphone adapters attached to headphones I use occasionally.
It sucks to spend $50 on adapters and another $40 on Bluetooth adapters. But it is very usable now and I don't ever "miss" my headphone jack now that I have the proper infrastructure setup.
How would you sell "no audio jack" to me? What's my gain here?
There's still a minor downside, I can't charge my phone with my (wired) headphones plugged in - but I can get almost 2 days without charging my phone (an XR) so that's never bothered me at all.
For me, the camera on the iPhone XR is _totally_ worth the "downside" of Apple's "no audio jack" decision. That's a very personal thing (I want great low light camera performance for band/gig photos) and it's not something I'd ever tell somebody else is an important purchase decision for them. Same for you, there's no way I'd try to "sell no audio jack" to you. But I might advise that whatever _other_ feature a specific phone has for your personal use cases might possibly override the downsides of no headphone jack.
I mean, practically, once they've managed to kill audio jacks we'll probably transition to HDCP-like DRM for audio so that you need Approved(tm) headphones to listen to your favourite pop music. Once we get there that will be the feature for you ...
More choice of phones when buying one.
the main issue for me is that bluetooth audio just doesn't sound very good. most of my music is in mp3, which pretty much guarantees a lossy-to-lossy transcode for bluetooth. the inline DAC adapters tend to be pretty bad as well. I don't really expect a high fidelity audio experience from a smartphone, but the official google adapter for the pixel 2 is noticeably worse than the onboard dac in my old nexus 5x. not a showstopper, but very frustrating considering how much I spent on the phone.
Or just buy a phone that has a headphone jack, and not limit your options. You can still use bluetooth audio on a phone with an aux port if you want. But there are still lots of decent phone choices that have DO an aux port, eg the new pixel 4a we're talking about, no need to limit yourself.
If I don't have to buy adaptors (one for my desk at home, one for my backpack, one for my desk at work, one for my car, one for the first trip when I forget to take one...) I've saved $50-100.
My phone does have a headphone jack but I still use one of these. The difference is not close to subtle.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...
Also, they’re quite effective devices: https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...
Edit: to be clear, this shouldn’t be needed, but alas, we cannot steer Apple.
It’s not even about charging. It’s about having to buy a USB-C hub just to plug in my headphones and midi controller to my iPad Pro.
I think the better solution if you can afford it is a Bluetooth receiver (Fiio make a nice one) for your old headphones.
If you are getting new earphones get some of the cheap Chinese BT earbuds. They are really cheap these days and work quite well for the money. I got a quite nice pair for ~$35AUD from amazon. Surprisingly good.
I understand that it doesn't fit everyone though.
If you want to use wired headphones, the $9 adapter works well. Wireless headphones are also widely available and have batteries that last all day.
I realise the above doesn’t perfectly cater to all customers, but anecdotally it seems to cater well enough to enough of them.
I know there's a (kind of bulky) dongle for charging + headphones, but I'd rather buy a device that has the ports I need already.
The $9 adapter is cool though. Afaik it's pretty much the best budget usb dac around.
I've pre-ordered the pixel 4A. My phone was dying anyway, but I'm going to like having a headphone jack again.
As for myself, I bought Bose QC35's prior to upgrading to my first jackless iPhone so I was never affected by its absence. I almost never use earbuds.
On the point about affordable wireless headphones, many of us have spent a lot of time and money finding a great wired headphone setup. I don't want to go spend another £300 and 20-30 hours of my time finding an equivalent setup, all because some industrial designer wants his design another millimeter thinner.
Lastly bluetooth still sucks, particularly if you change devices a lot. I've yet to see a BT setup that allows me to easily change my headphones between my laptop, my phone and my ps4 in under 2 seconds.
Personally I don’t know anyone who routinely charges their phone anytime other than when in bed. And personally I don’t know anyone who has an issue with all day battery life. I’ve no doubt these are still issues for some people but again, wireless charging pads are cheap.
I agree multi device Bluetooth sucks. But that’s not your only option. My QC35 are great for two-device use cases. In your scenario I’d use a wired connection for one of the three devices and your instant switching criteria is solved.
(I’m assuming you’re fine with one wired connection given that you’re criticising the removal of headphone jacks.)
Happy to see they are keeping it in future iterations of the 'a' series.
Same here - I held onto my Pixel 1 & only jumped to 3A when it came out.
Mostly it was that I had an existing wired setup fitted to my ears, but the real reason to hate BT was that I wasn't always charging them up. The airpods style charging case + a charging mat might have solved those problems, but the charger was more annoying than the wires themselves.
I happily use bluetooth in the car, which doesn't have the same sort of "did I forget to charge it?" problems.
But an obvious problem is that the touchscreen is activated by my leg. I had to actually lock the lockscreen just to prevent the phone from constantly opening random apps and providing random input.
Honestly, I did try to embrace this trend by buying a Nexus 6P when it came out in 2015. I thought I'll just get used to it. I did not. Besides being a pain in the rear to use with one hand, it ripped holes through my pockets with its sharp corners. So when they then announced the (5") Pixel 1 a year later, I bought one immediately and it's still my primary phone. Still, it's a tad larger than would be comfortable, I find it that iPhone 5 (or 5S or 1st gen SE) is an ideal size for me. The only problem with these is that they run iOS.
Also, even if when new they might be water tight, after you leave it in the sun the glue that holds the phone together and seals it will melt and age. On a samsung I discovered that above the buttons it had less than 1 mm of glue.
I also have saved many a social music situation when someone was having bluetooth pairing issues and I just busted out my aux cable, plugged and and blammo the party has music. I'm an IT guy, could I have fixed the bluetooth pairing? Probably. But not quicker than just plugging in.
So we're out there, THERE ARE DOZENS OF US! :)
13 hour flight, airports, etc... fewer dongles, fewer things to charge, etc.
(I have an inexpensive set of cabled noise cancelling earphones that run off a single AAA battery, which always gets packed in my carryon...)
A couple of phones did have a decent dac/amp combo built in (HTC 10, and some LG phones), FWIW.
Since then I have been using the NextDrive SpectraX. I highly recommend it, it sounds even better than the HTC 10, and now I can use (almost) whatever phone I want.
edit: Oops, I missed that you specified you were already using a DragonFly. Is that not as good as the HTC 10 was? I would have thought it'd be better...
I still appreciate a good headphone jack though. The usb-c connectors aren't always reliable and ignoring inline controls. A phone with a solid DAC & amp would be best. Unfortunately it seems only LG make those these days and their Android skin is horrible.
One thing with the 10 was that security updates were basically nonexistent. You got one or two major OS updates, but nothing in between, and nothing after. Lots of phones have this problem, but then again some don't.
Worse than that, the Oreo update completely broke my phone. I went from 2-3 days of battery life with my typical, light usage to something like 12-16 hours with NO usage, screen completely off the entire time. Fixing that required downgrading to Nougat, which required S-OFF, which required me physically mailing my phone to a hacker group and paying around $35. And of course this left me a year or more behind in security patches.
Based on the xda thread about this, it affected lots of people, but was never acknowledged or fixed. Consider yourself lucky :)
The LG phones are, one would hope, not this bad. But still, my takeaway from the experience is that tethering (heh) oneself to a single model or line or phones is really, really bad. The inconvenience of the dongle is, in retrospect, only slightly annoying in comparison.
And there can be significant cost savings. My Moto G6 and SpectraX together cost less than one of LG's phones, and I expect to reuse the SpectraX with my next phone as well. Buying a new DAC/AMP every 1-3 years doesn't really seem right, does it?
1) My car stereo doesn't have Bluetooth.
2) Very few earbuds fit my ears comfortably. After a lot of experimenting I've found a couple wired models that do fit my ears fine. Given the cost and limited selection of wireless earbuds, finding a good pair will be a chore, if I even can.
3) Once in a while having two ports is handy.
There are probably dongle solutions to 1 and 3, and maybe I can find some that fit my ears well. But that all sounds like way more hassle than just not buying phones that have been designed to exclude some pretty basic functionality.
This you can fix easily with a $30 dongle that stays in a car, some of them will power on and start playing from where you left off when power is applied (i.e., when you start the car, provided you leave it plugged in).
I don't use Bluetooth headphones, but for the car, it's perfect.
I got a phone that is just usb-c. Carrying around the adapter sucks, and Bluetooth is an even bigger pain in the ass.
Well, no, the simple fix is to ignore the headphone jack. If your needs are "reasonably priced phone", there's no reason to plug the jack. You'd have to have some other need, like "and it can't have a headphone jack".
I actually realized I can get usb-c / lightning covers as well, which is great as all my phones get lint in there, eventually causing problems with charging.
1. batteries run out and can't use until recharged. Even if that only took 10 minutes I wanted to use my headphone now, not later.
2. batteries die and are not replaceable. Bad for both pocketbook and the environment
3. interference can make them unusable. Try walking through a crowded train station and you'll find you get about 2 seconds of audio for every 5 seconds of nothing.
1 step forward (no wires) 3 steps back.
1. No wire randomly snagging on door handles and other objects.
2. No forgetting your phone is on the table when getting up and yanking it off the table with the wire.
3. You can switch the source with a click, e.g. if you're listening to music on your phone and want to watch something on your computer.
4. It doesn't really matter where the source is: while having a meeting on your computer you can seamlessly get up and make yourself some tea while you keep talking and listening.
5. No physical connection to erode. Maybe I'm doing something terrible, but I've had issues with the headphone jack with nearly every phone I've had and nearly every headphones I've owned. It wears out, somehow.
It's well worth it for me, but I can't speak for anyone else obviously.
The fact is performance wise wired headphones are still just better, as well as far cheaper for audio quality.