Pixel Phone Reviews: A 'Truly Great Camera' and a 'Home Run' for Google

"And I thought I could trust you Eric"
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The genius with Eric Schmidt (2004)
"Development of what was to become the iPhone (and iPhone OS 1) began in 2004" source wikipedia
 
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mattopotamus said:
It is still going to flop b.c of the way google is handling distribution. Bestbuy and Verizon are the only brick and mortar stores that sell it. They are not look for nexus sales numbers...this is their phone to compete with the iphone. I will actually be shocked if I see a single on in the wild.
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Exactly. Google should have made the Pixel/Pixel available for all four of the major US cellphone carriers at physical stores right from the start, not just Verizon.

However, I believe the Pixel relies a lot of the technology pioneered by the very under-rated HTC 10, one of the more competent Android phones out there. As such, hardware-wise the Pixel will at least be a good phone.
 
Red Oak said:
I don't think selecting it from a list/drop down menu would be too difficult for you
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Assuming that's actually the case. It's rarely that simple. Look at Maps. There's no way for me to set Google Maps as the default, even though it's still superior to Apple Maps in nearly every way.

Regardless, isn't Apple supposed to be making the best phones? A great phone with a **** search engine is no longer a great phone.
 
sully54 said:
I think this is the first time Apple has real competition to the iPhone.

iPhone is successful because Apple is a services company. We all like to think of Apple as a software/hardware company but the real invisible force that keeps the company going are services. Until now, only hardware companies have tried to face off against the iPhone and, while they may have had good products on paper, they lacked the services to support the product.

This time it's different however. Google is also a services company—an arguably better one than Apple. And now they've built hardware. The biggest hurdle google faces is convincing andoird users who are used to buying cheap smartphones to pay a premium for the pixel.

Time will tell how this goes but google has a huge opportunity to take a large piece of the pie from Apple. Apple, on their part, can't be complacent or else they risk fading into irrelevance, just like blackberry.
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Nope. Look at sales. Look at product announcements.
 
Amacfa said:
Took them 9 years to make a Iphone for Android. Now try to catch up to next years edge-to-edge.
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As you know the Android ecosystem does a lot of different things. Sharp created a phone with truly edge to edge display across 3 sides, and for comfort reasons there was a bottom lip. Link to image from Sharp's website here. It would be cool to see an iPhone with edge to edge display, but your statement implies iPhone is cutting edge, as with most tech companies, Apple looks around, finds an idea and incorporates into their design language.

petsk said:
You know something is seriously wrong when they change the Android GUI each time a new version is released.
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It only looks as though the GUI has changed. In fact it's more that the launcher has changed. If you've used Android then you're familiar with how using a different launcher can make the OS look pretty different. That's a strength of Android. The actual GUI design (app tray, notifications, multi-tasking) hasn't changed much. Just because icons are round, doesn't mean suddenly the GUI changed. I can change those right back to whatever I want with Nova Launcher.

otternonsense said:
And an *ahem* familiar front design. That said, I do like Google's attempt, and I hope it will catch on.
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Ohh I get you, yeah this phone looks a lot like an iPhone that looks a lot like an HTC phone that looks a lot like who knows what else. In all seriousness it does look like an iPhone, but it also looks like an HTC Desire. Ron Amadeo at ArsTechnica provides great analysis on what might be going on with this, Google's first attempt at "designing" their own phone. Here's a comparison image he used in his post.

mattopotamus said:
It is still going to flop b.c of the way google is handling distribution. Bestbuy and Verizon are the only brick and mortar stores that sell it. They are not look for nexus sales numbers...this is their phone to compete with the iphone. I will actually be shocked if I see a single on in the wild.
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I know of 3 people buying the 128 GB XL version, but this is just an anecdote and I am a tech head. I agree, I think Google's going to struggle to sell this. I hope I'm wrong, but going with one carrier is going to hurt them. Americans still, en masse, tend to buy phones from their cellular services supplier rather than Best Buy or Amazon.

Amacfa said:
Because one spends the time to find out what works, the other just looks at what the other did.
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Hi again. See above post. A lot of people copy Apple, and Apple copies a lot of people. It took a while but eventually Apple incorporated a notification system that was better than STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING HERE'S A TEXT MESSAGE system right? Are you saying Apple needed five iterations of iOS to find out what works? I won't argue Google does a lot more looking around on the whole, but if they can look around and iterate and improve it pushes everyone to do better so really, why gripe about that?

By the way I think that statement was more of an allusion to Patrick Gibson's statement, linked here through a Daring Fireball post.
 
JosephAW said:
I keep hearing the word "but".
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Probably because this is a great start, BUT it will take more than one good phone for Google to truly compete with Apple. They will have prove that they consistently build good phones, then a good desktop experience, then a good TV experience, etc. The Chromecast is, in my opinion, not a real competitor to Apple TV-like devices, nor is the Chromebook usable for real desktop tasks. They need to create an ecosystem of comparable quality to what Apple has, not just a phone.
 
Apple should be very worried about this. Apple is really good at hardware and the hardware/software combo, but they suck at services. Google is the king of services and now comes with a top notch hardware device and huge software platform they control.

Some examples:

Siri is still unusable. Google Assistant will blow it out of the water for sure. Because Google doesn't care about your privacy they can do much more. Meanwhile, the progress of Siri is next to non-existent: It still doesn't know when my deliveries will arrive, it's next to impossible to add an appointment or reminder, it cannot give directions to my next appointment, it doesn't understand the name of half of my contacts, it gives directions to a store on the other side of the globe, ... But hey, I can set my alarm with it.

Google Photos is so much better than Apple Photos and now they offer unlimited storage for photos at full resolution and documents. Meanwhile, Apple Photo Faces are not syncing between my devices because of.. well privacy. I don't get a great photo album when I return from my trip because.. yes privacy. But the majority of people don't care about privacy and just want something that works and assists them. And by the way: it's really hard to defend the 5Gb free tier of iCloud anno 2016.

All in all, it seems that Apple is moving too slow. They had a huge advantage 5-10 years ago but the competition is catching up, quickly. They are becoming the Microsoft of the 90's.
 
"Everything you shoot is stored in the cloud for free, forever"

This is the way it should work.

You should not have to pay for backup, it's part of the product and the customer experience.

My main reason for not buying a Google product is their view on privacy. A company that reads my private e-mail to sell advertisement will never get me as a paying customer.

I don't trust Google, they say they are not evil, but that's like North Korea calling themselves Democratic People's Republic of Korea
 
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Why in the hell did they make it look exactly like an iPhone? It costs virtually the same as an iPhone; why not just get an iPhone if you want something that looks like an iPhone? I guess this is mostly targeted toward Android users who want an iPhone but can't stand to use iOS?

The hardware is impressive, and that's all that really matters, but this would be a far more attractive device if it sought a different visual ascetic. Virtually every smartphone looks like a rectangular plastic/aluminum slab these days, and the iPhone has chosen one of the blandest approaches matching that trend.

It seems as if Google went, "Hey, Apple is selling boring-looking phones like crazy. Let's make our own phone, and let's make it just as boring."
 
Very interested in getting this phone but it's hard to justify the price knowing I'll probably get the newer iphone next year.
 
usamaah said:
Your state implies the Iphone is cutting edge
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Iphone certainly is cutting edge in many respects right now.

Let alone next year, if they actually do integrate a bezeless edge to edge Iphone with integrated touch-ID, camera, and sensors behind the display - which rumors seem to point to.
 
melchior said:
How is this different the Nexus? Google doesn't own factories now, do they?
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If you mean design, then yeah it looks like this is a phone taken from one of HTC's designs. However Nexus phones were actually designs or phones the manufacturer was working on that the manufacturer would decide should be a Nexus (when commissioned by Google to make a Nexus).

If you mean the actual manufacturing, then no Google does not own factories just like Apple doesn't own Foxconn factories. However two things 1) as mentioned Google is actually designing more of the phone than ever, they simply go to HTC to handle the construction/building and 2) not sure how accurate these rumors are but some believe Google is, like Apple, considering designing their own chips (either supporting chips on the silicon or maybe actually the CPU), though personally I think even if they went that far (and I doubt they would), they'll simply license ARM designs and tweak them like Qualcomm does rather than do their own like Apple did.
 
The fact that I'm continuously bashing iOS doesn't mean I like Android more. Android is in fact worse than iOS, because it took a good UNIX-like OS and trashed it in a way it needs antiviruses while proposing development in an inefficient interpreted language.

If Google Pixel ran an operating system (be it Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD, or any other real operating system), then I think it would be better than the iPhone. But it runs Android, which is even worse than iOS. So, another low-quality useless toy in the market.
 
JaySoul said:
This is good. Competition is healthy and spurs companies onto greater things.

Apple and Samsung are being put on notice by Google and Huawei.

Us consumers will benefit.
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Samsung maybe. This will impact the android market. You're not going to best Apple by releasing last years iPhone with a few merely ok Google services.
 
Amacfa said:
Iphone certainly is cutting edge in many respects right now.

Let alone next year, if they actually do integrate a bezeless edge to edge Iphone with integrated touch-ID, camera, and sensors behind the display - which rumors seem to point to.
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It is cutting edge. But it's cutting edge with a lot of other phones. Waterproof is cool, it's been around a while. Touch ID is cool, now everyone has a fingerprint sensor. Camera is arguably matched by Samsung and now Pixel. As I said, edge to edge has been done and Samsung's iterating their version of it, Sharp did true edge to edge, so Apple doing it would bring it main stream because of the number of iPhone consumers, but it isn't truly cutting edge as in the first to ever do it. Isn't that what cutting edge is?

In my opinion the most cutting edge thing about all the recent iPhones is their processor. Just blows everyone out of the water. It's awesome. But the other features, Samsung and others have been experimenting more than Apple. Apple waited to introduce waterproof when they had "courage," I guess.
 
sully54 said:
I think this is the first time Apple has real competition to the iPhone.

iPhone is successful because Apple is a services company. We all like to think of Apple as a software/hardware company but the real invisible force that keeps the company going are services. Until now, only hardware companies have tried to face off against the iPhone and, while they may have had good products on paper, they lacked the services to support the product.

This time it's different however. Google is also a services company—an arguably better one than Apple. And now they've built hardware. The biggest hurdle google faces is convincing andoird users who are used to buying cheap smartphones to pay a premium for the pixel.

Time will tell how this goes but google has a huge opportunity to take a large piece of the pie from Apple. Apple, on their part, can't be complacent or else they risk fading into irrelevance, just like blackberry.
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The custom A10 that obliterates the competition and the Taptic Engine with 3D Touch tells me that Apple is the most skilled hardware company in the smartphone space today.

Let's not forget the logistics involved in manufacturing, selling, and shipping millions of phones to multiple countries on day 1 of release.

Google is a great software company that got their Pixel made by HTC with an SoC by Qualcomm.

Apple IS a software AND hardware company. A better hardware company than Google and most of their competition.
 
The phone is a mixed bag to many android stalwarts. Yes, the option of a (seemingly) high end device is a welcome addition to the fold of android phones, but the flip side is that many of us have now been priced out of any devices that run stock android.

Apple has never made any pretense (iphone 5C notwithstanding) about lowering the price point of the iphone. Its been an expensive device from day 1.

I'm in the market for a new smartphone right now to replace my 3 year old Nexus 5. There are more than two dozen options if I am willing to consider android devices up to a year old.

As much as the Pixel intrigues me (and it does), I cannot in good faith drop 1.6x-2x the cost of a midrange phone for a Pixel. Could I afford it? Yes, if I saved my pennies and stretched my budget for a month or two... but the value of doing so is not immediately apparent.

The device I would select is the Pixel XL since the Pixel is not QHD, which puts the phone at $870! :eek: ¡Santa María! that's expensive!
 
Pixel is an overpriced Nexus with no standout features and a very lazy design IMO.

As for software, 3 messaging apps in the apps drawer that don't work together and interfaces with my contacts differently? Really??

Pixel is a decent Android alternative but the media truly is desperate for a counterweight to Apple it seems.

AI had a great write up about it: http://iphone.appleinsider.com/arti...one-7-plus-but-it-lacks-numerous-key-features
 
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