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Phones · Google Pixel

Google Pixel 2

48owners with an opinion
59%of verdicts positive
14/15positive/negative since 2024
7 yrslongest happy owner
2happy after 3+ years

Praised for design and reliability; criticized for battery and software.

What owners wrote

NeutralOwned 6 years
This has always been my policy. Use your machines/phones until they die/become unusable and only then buy something new. All my desktops/laptops/tablets are over 10 years old (core duo/core 2 duo/core i7) and my phone 6 years (Pixel 2). Only this year have i bought a new Macbook Pro (M3 Max) since my old mid-2010 27-inch iMac died (which i will get repaired soon with others).
Likes itOwned 5 years
Pixel 6a/7 (not 7a) for me. I had the Pixel 2 running Graphene OS for about 5 years and got the 6a a while back and put Graphene OS on it. You can get Gapps with Sandboxed Google Play Services, privacy, security and bloatfree experience. Because we have Google chips in these you also get 5 years of security updates (huge bonus!). The 7a has poorer battery life than the 6a/7 so its a poorer choice for my personal use case but ymmv. Otherwise the 6a runs about 3 days for me (got 4 out of it initially but I use my phone very little) or 2 days when driving and needing more usage out of it.
Doesn’t like itOwned 3 years
My pixel 4a 5g works like a charm. 3.5 years and still going fine. I used my pixel 2 for three years so badly. I used it as a hotspot every single day and the number of battery cycles were as if the phone was used for 6 years. My pixel 4a5g takes photos that are on reasonable standards, obviously they won't match match, but it doesn't make a serious difference either to me. I need three things from my phone - battery, camera and lag free user experience. I don't need thinner bezels for gods sake, I can't understand the craze and demand for thinner bezels over a two day battery life.
Likes itOwned 2 years
I'd love to say I've had the same experience, but unfortunately that isn't the case. I'm on my fourth Pixel 3 because of hardware issues (the first time it was my fault, all the other ones not really). My previous Pixel 2 worked flawlessly for two years. I'm starting to think of going back to Samsung after this experience. Which is a shame, because I do love how unencumbered with bullshit features and spamware the phones are.
Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year
When I first bought my pixel watch 2 I was able to optimize the settings to get almost 3 days of battery life. A year of firmware updates later, I am back down to less than 2 days using the same settings. I don't think the big manufacturers are going to change their ways anytime soon...
Doesn’t like itOwned 1 yearStill going
It is also maddening to me the degree to which sensor information is hidden, or simply not available at all. I got my Pixel 2 watch specifically for fitness and sleep tracking. A year on, and I am still completely unable to perform a spot SpO2 check. I'll get a nice, pretty and utterly unlabeled graph of my supposed saturations when I sleep, but that's it. It definitely feels like the people that make it don't actually use the thing.
Likes it
I say this as someone with tens of thousands in audio equipment, as someone who can hear the compression warble in the hihats and the cymbals - audio quality with earbuds doesn't actually matter. It's like the argument for audio quality in cars - you're listening in a hostile environment, and convenience wins over fidelity. I remember walking to work one time with over-the-ear Sennheisers attached to my iPod and it felt ridiculous, and unsafe. I finally capitulated to earbuds when they started giving them away with the Pixel phones. The "find my" feature basically justifies the pro-prices, to me, because my biggest complaint about bluetooth earbuds in my own use case was how easily they're lost. I've lost and recovered my Pixel Buds Pro 2 a couple of times now. When traveling a lot by train and plane, the convenience of pocket-sized noise-cancelling earbuds has become worth it for me. But when I'm on meetings, I'm wired in. During the pandemic, I lost track of how many times my colleagues' Airpods would sputter out and die in the middle of a client meeting. Then they'd switch to wired headphones and their Macbook microphone. They sounded better, they could hear better, and there was no battery power sword of Damocles anymore.
Likes it
> big bulge on the top-left of the device and no longer sit flat on a table Fucking hate this trend so much. My Pixel 8 is an absolute dogshit phone compared to my Pixel 2 for the same reason. Phones are giant now, impossible to use with one hand anymore, and slide off of fucking everything because they don't lie flat, and are uncomfortable to hold with how top-heavy they are too. I wish phone design would have stagnated, about 10 years ago. A phone's form factor did not need innovating! It was already perfect!
Doesn’t like it
I still have the Pixel Watch 2 and it's much the same, battery barely lasts a day, if even that. I didn't know this going in. I had purchased the Pixel 8 I think it was and saw the watch was heavily discounted if I bundled it in so I did. Will never buy another one. I'm a heavily sleeper and need multiple alarms sometimes to wake up and would often use my watch alarm to supplement my phone. So it became a nightly routine of making sure I didn't forget to charge my watch before bed, lest it dies in the middle of the night.
Doesn’t like it
I sold my Pixel Watch 2, but I wasn't able to get two days' worth. The sacrifices weren't worth it. Namely, you'd have to turn off the always on screen (I gave this up easily), as well as "flick to wake", which I found harder to give up. If I were to press a button on my watch to read a notification, I may as well use my phone. YMMV.
Doesn’t like it
Secure boot and OEM bootloader unlock should be able to work with images so you can lock a phone after the upgrade again. I managed to get a US refubished Pixel 2 somehow with a fuselocked bootloader here in Ireland. I bought it second hand but I've no idea how it got that way. But I'm suck on the Pixel image and I wanted to use it for ROM testing etc.
Doesn’t like it
As an aside, I really liked my Google Nexus 5x, but it felt like basic quality control fell off a cliff for the Pixel line. Between Pixel 2/4/8 (yeah yeah what can I say I'm a masochist), I had problems with out-of-focus pictures, widely inaccurate GPS, and my absolute favorite making a call which would dial the number and then about a second later immediately hang up. I had a brief fling with using an iPhone but the speech-to-text dictation was absolute GARBAGE DAY and I make pretty heavy use of that feature while walking my dog.
Likes it
Exactly the reason I own a pixel. Pixels get first class support by google in terms of software which means I can rock my phone for several generations before upgrading. I've owned a 2, 6, and now 9. Even though the 9 is much faster than the 2 or 6, I've reached a point where that performance difference simply doesn't matter. I'm not being held back by the CPU in any real way. That leaves security, software, and battery life as the main reasons why I might decide to update my phone.
Likes it
I'll be honest, I didn't feel much of a difference changing from my Pixel 2 to my Pixel 6. Actually, I liked my Pixel 2 more. Boy do I miss that back fingerprint sensor. As well as the squeeze feature. What a great design. Also, it cleanly fit in my pocket. Pixel 2 was peak Pixel if you ask me. (never tried the 3) Really the only reason I ended up switching was because I had already replaced the lens on the rear camera after some dirt got into it and I had cracked that back glass while taking it apart. Not a big deal, but it felt like time to move on I guess. I definitely got excited about all the new features of 6 and then promptly never actually used any of them.
Doesn’t like it
> I feel like GrapheneOS shot itself in the foot, being exclusive to Pixel phones. Pixel phones were great, in the past, but now they're mediocre Interesting that someone would say this. I’ve had several Nexus and Pixel phones in the past (last one was a Pixel 2) and they were all pretty bad in terms of hardware and the support from google was non existent. I only bought for them for the software… which wasn’t great either. They have always been mediocre phones, to put it mildly.
Likes it
Ya everyone derives different value from their stuff. Is that how you're judging value for price or just the quality of the folding bit? I do quite like the Galaxy Fold, but I think my needs from any kind of smartphone pretty much could top out at a Pixel 2, rocking a 7 atm.
Neutral
+1 for NextDNS. Have been using them for years for blocking ads but also helped me troubleshoot some issues, as I could live track DNS queries by device. Note the free plan is great for several devices as long as they’re not Apple . For some reason, 2+ Apple devices blow through the 300,000 query limit really easily. When I used a Pixel 2 I think it averaged 60,000 and fit in the quota with my other devices, and when I switched to iPhone it pushed the total over 300,000. But they’re cheap and definitely worth it.
Doesn’t like it
If I were the crusading type, I'd be on a crusade against single-button interfaces. It's so annoying to have "single tap to pause, double tap to skip to next track" because the timing seems to mess up intermittently. Did I just pause the track or skip? Is the next track just starting too quietly for this environment, or did I pause? Touch-sensitive inputs, like those on the google pixel buds pro 2, are even worse. Any touch can have weird results as it might be detected as a swipe or a long-touch. Kudos to the Jabra earbuds I was gifted recently, they can remap the single/double/triple clicks, so a single click for me is now next track. And as I age, I get dry skin which sometimes doesn't even register as a touch. I'd love to see a range of accessible hardware that has actual buttons that clearly state what they do, and have visual+haptic+audio feedback which can be configured.
Doesn’t like it
used to be a long time pixel user. I had a pixel 2, 3 and 4a. 1. first one suddenly started bootlooping out of nowhere 2. second one's battery suddenly expanded out of nowhere and couldn't hold a charge more than 10 min 3. thrid one's battery started failing and woudln't turn on unless I plugged it into an external battery bank. Sll 3 times while I was abroad and they are almost IMPOSSIBLE to get repaired. they use all csutom parts so none of teh repair shops were famiilar with them. google wouldn't do a thing till I came back to the united states to get the repairs done. After 3 of these pieces of shit, I switched to an iphone. It just works. I've had zero issues with it and at least apple care won't force me to buy a ticket back to the states just to replace it.