Yeah it’s pretty great, really smooth. I guess that’s part of the experience. I’ve just been enjoying it, without realizing that it may be adding to the experience.
I love it, it’s a nice bit of kit, and the few gimmicks it has are useful: scheduled charging for better battery life, digital well being stuff to stop me being glued to my phone.
Battery would be a problem for a super power user, but lasts me all day with commuting, reading the web etc. Camera is not on a par with flagships but I rarely take pictures.
Prior to this I had a Huawei until the battery died on me. I upgrade when I have to, I hate consumer upgrade cycles.
I have zero android ecosystem products.
I’m Android/Linux all the way unless work force me to use a Mac, which happens periodically, as part of the great cycle of life.
Galaxy S10e. I love the small size of it and the fact that it still has a microSD slot and headphone jack. Its starting to show its age when it comes to battery life and the USB C port not working as good.
I like the Samsung android software with the customization that you get with Good Lock so I will probably stick with Samsung flagship for my next phone. The biggest thing I dislike with Samsung is the amount of bloatware they ship, the out of box experience is terrible and I usually have to spend a day researching what apps to disable with adb to get the phone usable. I will probably upgrade to an S23 next year. I usually buy my phones used when the model has been out for about a year. At a year old its still new enough to have plenty of support left, but its no longer the current model so it sells for less. Its a better value IMO then buying a new mid range phone, especially as there isn’t as much advancement year to year in hardware these days. A year old flagship will have better cameras than a new mid range phone typically.
This is what I did as well. Bought an S22 Ultra a few weeks after the S23 line launched. The usual cons I found that I actually didn’t mind. No expandable storage? 256GB is way too much for me; I can’t fill that up with apps and photos. I also use wireless earbuds so I’m not mourning the 3.5 jack. I’ve always been a fan of the Note line so it’s perfect for me.
I’m considering an Android smartwatch but I’m not doing research yet. I will also likely buy a previous generation device if ever.
I have never owned an Apple product, not even an iPod.
I feel they’ve overcomplicated it with all the themed stuff on the top row. And also, in fact moreso, I hate what they did with Creations - so often I get a notification that Photos has made a collage or an animation or whatever, but if I don’t follow the notification right away, I find it really hard to find them in the app later. Used to be much simpler.
Also (and they may have changed this admittedly, I haven’t checked) at the time of those changes, they borked the video editor by making all outputs in portrait mode, even if shot in landscape. So you ended up with huge black spaces at the top and bottom instead of a frame filling 16:9 output.
Those all sound like fair complaints! Pretty glad I don’t use it much, haha. My main purpose for it is sharing photos of my kids with my parents a few states away.
Galaxy Fold 4. Would have immediately recommended it but this past weekend the inside screen protector cracked down the middle. I need to contact Samsung and see how big of a hassle this is to get it replaced. I’ve only had the phone like 6 months, this really shouldn’t be this fragile
Being able to use Add-ons makes it world’s better than other mobile browser’s. I use Firefox on my desktop so it’s all synced between and I can grab tabs from either which is handy too.
I have to use Microsoft Launcher because I have a Pixel and the ad-riddled Google search is baked into Pixel’s native launcher.
I do recommend it. Offers a lot more customisation. The At a Glance is worlds more useful than Google’s news section and the Microsoft news is better).
It lets you overhaul the whole layout. I replaced the Google search with a bing search widget which opens up in Firefox. Can also just put a Firefox widget if you prefer.
So nice not having every search appear in a temporary window that disappears when I search a second thing. Even nicer not to have adverts on every search.
Google Pixel 6. I upgraded from an iPhone 8 a year ago. I love how open the os is, letting me do a bunch more then what’s on the app store.
For headphones I have Soundcore Q30. They’re decent Bluetooth headphones, that were pretty cheap when I bought them.
I use Windows with WSL. I tried switching to Linux for over a month, but I had too many issues with Windows only apps.
I also love usb-c. Almost all my devices can charge using the same cords. The only exceptions are my laptop with a 200W brick, and my diabetes pump. Nothing I can do about those.
I use a Pixel 5 with MicroG Lineage OS. I like it quite a bit: it’s fast, has good battery life, and thanks to Lineage OS, it doesn’t spy on me (as much). I do miss having an SD card slot and headphone jack, but those are hard to find anywhere these days, unfortunately.
I don’t have a specific upgrade schedule: I upgrade phones when the need arises. My last phone (Nexus 6) was showing its age: it was slow, the battery struggled to hold a charge, and the USB port was worn out. Switching to Lineage OS and a wireless charger helped with these problems somewhat, but it was still time for an upgrade. My phone before that (Droid Razr M) was stuck in a boot loop, so had to upgrade that, as well.
I have an iPad 3 sitting around somewhere, but otherwise, not much of an Apple person. I try to use Linux whenever possible (I know Android isn’t a traditional GNU/Linux system, but with Lineage OS and Termux, it’s close enough for me).
Are you happy with it? What are its best and worst qualities?
I love the phone. Its my first non low-end android, and I can’t see myself going back to an iPhone. I love the assortment of emulators available for Android, and the pixel 7 main camera is very good. The selfie camera could use some work, but picture taking is not what I got this phone for anyway.
Which phones have you had previously? Which were the best and worst of the lot?
My previous phones were an iPhone 11 and an iPhone 5C before that. I have a Moto G pure (low end android) for a little bit, although it was more of a secondary phone instead of something to switch to, as it is very sluggish to use. The iPhone 11 was a good phone, the selfie camera is still better than my current pixel phone. I definitely craved the feeling of freedom I got from my Motorola though, despite its shortcomings. So I went ahead and got my pixel.
How often do you upgrade to a new phone? Very rarely, I might be upgrading more often now though due to pixels having shorter security update Windows than iPhones.
What other Android ecosystem devices do you have? Watches, headphones/earbuds, etc.
None at the moment, although I am planning on getting Pixel buds.
Do you also use any Apple products, or are you Android all the way? (And/or Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, etc.)
For now I am android all the way. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 11 on it, I have tried to switch to Linux but my laptops display needs fractional scaling as the dimensions of the screen are different from the resolution. So until fractional scaling gets better on nvidia cards I’ll have to stay with Windows.
Samsung Internet is honestly an underrated browser. It has the ability to put the navigation bar at the bottom. I like a lot of its features and how light it is.
Just made the change to a Pixel 6a from my really old Samsung Galaxy.
My only requirement was about size. I wanted something “smaller”, first I thought about going with a newer Samsung from their mid-range ‘A’ category, but after seeing how big those things were, I decided to look outside the Samsung ecosystem.
I discovered GrapheneOS and as an open-source enthusiast, I really liked the idea. The professionalism of the dev team and the bloat free aspect of the OS made me get a Pixel.
The size is not that bad, but I wish it would be a bit smaller. So far I’m really liking it. I love the camera of this thing (even without GCam). The physical button placement was a bit weird for me at first, but I’ve gotten used to it.
I usually abuse my phones till they die, so I was looking for something that would last and I really think that I will be able to go for 5 years with this phone without an issue.
I don’t use Brave anymore but god, I remember really loving that bottom search bar layout (with the search icon rather than the whole bar). It was probably one of the hardest things for me to get used to not having when I switched to Firefox.
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