Google Pixel 4

I got a pixel 4 after some surgery basically for the fall detection. Otherwise it's mainly doing what the Fitbit I had 8(?) years ago did for me, with added GPS. Pulse, steps. As an ADHD-haver it's good to get notifications to the watch so that I can avoid unlocking the phone and risk falling down a rabbit-hole. I think that's under-sold. What I want is a decent (by which I mean SIMPLE) pomodoro app for it, and I'll probably have to write that myself. Does that make me a power user? I was surprised that finding such a thing would be difficult. I tend not to use it for payment because the ergonomics are terrible . Someone needs to tell that team that having the face on the inside of your wrist is entirely valid (especially if you don't want to be whacking your shiny watch face into every passing door handle), but that makes you do contortions if you want to get it close to a card reader. Not only that but the way screen locking works is ungainly enough that the fact you need to use it more with the face towards your body makes it a constant annoyance. I've unknowingly reorganised my widget order far too often because of this.

The charger on the 4 both sucks and blows. Countless times I’ve taken it off the charger to find 0%. The nice strap they showed in the adverts broke instantly when I took it out of the box. Two pins sheared right off the in the middle of the band. WearOS Apps are trash. I wish I had gone garmin. ;(

We don't even need to reverse the trend! Android is flexible, so it wouldn't be a big ask for one of the many models to be smaller! Each pixel is larger than the last. I was a Pixel 4 holdout until a few months ago when they stopped supporting tap-to-pay. The 10 is a monster, and the trend is as you say.

What’s the current state of the art in low power wake word and speech to text? Has anyone written a blog post on this? I was able to run a speech to text on my old Pixel 4 but it’s a bit flaky (the background process loses the audio device occasionally). I just want to take some wake word and then send everything to remote LLM and then get back text that I do TTS on.

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.

Google kinda irked me when they purchased Motorola - I was hopeful we'd get nice hardware with the android team focused on making android better but they instead gutted the company and sold it off and android has been more solid on non Google devices from what I can tell. From pixels not having an operating system shipping to people to pixels 4 and 7 having notable worse camera features (I should note I'm biased to how well the camera works since it's one of my three main uses of a smartphone) compared to say the Nexus 6 phones. I've wondered if android and pixel breaking off Google would be a good thing or not honestly since there is talk about cutting chrome off.

> and now, with this trade war, it's clear consumers will bear the burden. "Now"? The trade war has been on since what, 2017? > There's nothing inherently beneficial about manufacturing in the U.S. other than symbolic gestures tied to identity politics. While I think that argument can be made in general, if you consider certain sectors and certain products, the calculus changes. Onshoring chip production is a matter of national security. Not necessarily in the "big bad China will take over Taiwan and put backdoors in our chips" sense (though that's certainly a concern), but in the sense of not being dependent upon an adversarial state for fundamental advanced technology. > Most consumers want affordable, high-quality products Sure, but that's not sustainable. You end up playing "chase the country with the worst worker protections". This isn't the case of chips (yet?), but there are quite a few things where China used to be the go-to for manufacturing, but production has moved elsewhere because costs went up, and it's cheaper to stop doing it in China. The long-term end result of all this is that everywhere has labor costs that have gone up enough that offshoring doesn't really buy you all that much. Of course you can say, "okay, maybe that's true, but at least I can get my cheap iPhone now, and moving production to the US hurts that now, rather than decades from now". And I'm somewhat sympathetic to that. But ultimately Apple may just have to change how it pri…

How is durability? I use a Pixel 4 in https://ghostek.com/products/atomic-slim-pixel-4-series which is very nice because the bumper frame rises above the screen so when you drop it the screen doesn't break. Yet, it's not obnoxiously huge. I love this setup -- except for the Pixel 4 abysmal battery life.

lol, no? The most I got from Sony and Samsung in 2012 and 2015 was 1-2 years. Which is when I generally stopped using Android. It was frustraing enough to read all the news about "Google releases new Andoid with (list of features)" then asking when is my Sony/Samsung is getting that? to hear "oh maybe in 4 or 6 months if you're lucky. Or download this random ROM from `appzworrier` on xdaforum. Surely they haven't put any malware in the ROM or you'll hear about it here". I did give it another shot in 2019 with a Pixel 4 phone then after 2 RMAs with battery issues (4-5 hours of battery) I went back to iPhone. Funny thing is in 2013 and 2016 I switched back to the old iPhone I had before the upgrad, I just updated them to the latest iOS version there was at the time. After the shitshow I had with google support in 2019 I just gave up.

My father was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. We were staying with him in shifts, and when I was "off", I watched the last episode of succession. I made sure my phone was on the chair next to me and the notification / volume was all the way up. After the episode he was dead and I missed the whole thing b/c somewhere along the way "press volume button at home screen until it was full" did not actually turn notifications on anymore. I've never been so mad at UI/UX. Turning on ringer / notification volume requires pressing volume button once, then clicking the equalizer, then dragging the notification volume up to desired level. There's no indication anywhere that notifications are silenced. I have a google pixel 4.

IMO they peaked with the Nexus 6 - camera has gotten worse and they make up with it in software or try to. You could and can see this at night or stacked shots in N6 vs pixel 4,5,6. They bought the best phone hardware and software companies (Motorola and Android) and gutted them both.

Google had a town hall a few years ago. The Pixel Watch (4?) had just launched and supposedly fixed a bunch of bugs like apparently you could not reliably record a run with the previous generation without that app crashing and losing the workout. Someone in the audience asked about this, and the PM who responded was wearing an Apple Watch. Apparently everyone on that team at the meeting was wearing Apple Watches or a dumb watch They know this product is garbage