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Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

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Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#171
post #102
post #3

As an audio engineer, the headphone jack removal trend is an absolute travesty in an industry that utilizes AUX IN audio capabilities night after night. I'm often using iPods or other local-music devices to pump sound into concert venues between acts. Taking away 1/8" audio standards in favor of USB-C or Lightning non-standardized ports causes chaos when needing to fill in music in a pinch. In my industry, I simply c…

I am not an audio engineer but I own a pair of bluetooth headphones and 2 devices that I use them with and it's a nightmare as both devices fight over it. It seems to be the USB problem all over but an order of magnitude worse. I can't just flip the cable over, I need to disable bluetooth temporarily on the device that I don't want to pair.

I am not an audio engineer but I own BeatsX and use them across four devices without even thinking about it.

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can make the phone thinner, but they are only doing that by putting more hardware (a DAC) into the headphone. It's massively duplicating one component for such a negligible advantage.

I don't think the consumer cares about such duplication (indirectly, they will, if it makes the headphones cost more, though I think that cost will go down over time). An advantage I didn't mention in my original comment is: getting rid of cables. Personally, I hate headphone cables. They seem to always be getting tangled up when the headphones aren't in use (meaning I have to mess around untangling them before using…

> I don't think the consumer cares about such duplication

Aside from cost, more devices that need to be charged creates more overhead.

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#173
post #3

As an audio engineer, the headphone jack removal trend is an absolute travesty in an industry that utilizes AUX IN audio capabilities night after night. I'm often using iPods or other local-music devices to pump sound into concert venues between acts. Taking away 1/8" audio standards in favor of USB-C or Lightning non-standardized ports causes chaos when needing to fill in music in a pinch. In my industry, I simply c…

If you work in 'the industry', surely it would not be a big deal to carry around an adapter a long with the other standard tools of your trade? I imagine it'll be about as inconvenient as carrying around ear buds.

"I'm sure you can put up with this massive inconvenience for a job and workflow I have no understanding of or context for but sure do have an opinion on"

Found the SWE!

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless charging can't provide enough amps to actually charge newer Google devices. Nexus phones had them through the 5/7, but lost them with the 5x/6p. My Nexus 5 wall charger can't even push enough amps to charge my Nexus 5x. Edit: Does the new iPhone use the same wireless chargers as older phones? Can you use it with those Ikea lamps with wireless charging? Or does it use a different/less lossy transmission metho…

I wirelessly fast-charge my Samsung S7; I'm not sure where you got the idea that it doesn't work.

Is your phone getting super hot while wireless charging?

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#176
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my Pixel, but they just lost me as a customer for this reason. I'm not totally against removing the headphone jack, but it's not time yet -- the transition has been done poorly.

Why is it not time yet? When I lost my Pixel on a trip, I switched to an iPhone 7 + airpods and it's been great. I don't want to go back to wired headphones. Apple certainly seems to have nailed it. I can't imagine Google + HTC can't too.

For me it's not time yet because it's a clunky and annoying process to switch bluetooth earbuds from my phone to my laptop and back, at least compared to the simplicity of unplugging something. This is something I do multiple times a day.

Apple is the only company that has figured out how to make it easy, but it requires a iphone/macbook of course.

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#177

I witnessed my girlfriend's Nexus 6p support experience with Google and it was not pretty. I would never buy a Google phone after that. The phone, just barely out of warranty, goes into a bootloop and becomes a paperweight. Google helpfully shrugs the problem off on Huawei, and Huawei will of course not support the product since it's out of warranty. There is no repair option. I tried Android early on, had similarly…

I had a Nexus 5X die within the warranty period, and had a similar experience. LG's support was utterly awful, it took them 3 weeks to replace the phone.

They originally told me I could get a replacement 5X, then they told me I could get a T-Mobile G5 and what they eventually sent me was an AT&T specific G5 that required digging into config menus before it would connect to T-mobile LTE.

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so there's going to be a huge database of songs on my mobile!!! i don't think anybody asked for it... sounds like trickery... this is going to take up some storage space now... anyone know how many gb or mb this occupies in my phone... can v jus clear this data...

I doubt it, that would be a good chunk of data for what I see as a fairly small feature. More likely (this is a guess, nobody outside google really knows at this point), they will use federated machine learning to figure out that something is "a song", then perhaps clean up and isolate the actual "song" part of it and send that over to a google server for processing. But again it was just announced, so nobody really…

They announced, in the talk, that this is all done locally on the phone. The phone will have a database of, iirc, 10,000 songs locally.

[edit] typos

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is what the Moto X4 is. https://www.blog.google/products/project-fi/project-fi-welco...

The Moto X4 won’t get Android Preview Releases, and is therefore useless for developers. I’m a student, but I also develop apps. Even with the emulator, there are still bugs you can only find on real devices. So now every time a new Android version comes out, I’ll either end up with a month where my apps are broken and I’m slowly working on fixing them (so ~10% of the time the app is unusable), or I have to shell out…

This is a good perspective I hadn't considered.

Additionally, my largest concern with no mid-range device supporting preview releases is that the mid-range phone experience is going to decline rapidly (slow downs, resource bloat) until the only viable equivalent experience to what we have now is on a $1000+ phone. When phones were sub $500, I could get a new one every two years pretty reasonably. Or if I didn't like my phone, it wasn't a huge hit to upgrade early. But now I'm paying more than 2x what I paid when I started using Android phones. At that price point, Apple starts to look real good.

Re: Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL announced

#180

I witnessed my girlfriend's Nexus 6p support experience with Google and it was not pretty. I would never buy a Google phone after that. The phone, just barely out of warranty, goes into a bootloop and becomes a paperweight. Google helpfully shrugs the problem off on Huawei, and Huawei will of course not support the product since it's out of warranty. There is no repair option. I tried Android early on, had similarly…

> I witnessed my girlfriend's Nexus 6p support experience with Google and it was not pretty. I would never buy a Google phone after that. The phone, just barely out of warranty, goes into a bootloop and becomes a paperweight. Google helpfully shrugs the problem off on Huawei, and Huawei will of course not support the product since it's out of warranty. There is no repair option.

Something similar happened to my wife with her Nexus5X. Google shipped an update that bricked a ton of 5X phones, and Google stopped responding to her Customer Service emails.

We've been Nexus (specifically pure Nexus) users since the first Google phone. I own a G1, still in my closet. I own all of them (well, at least one of each generation). I own a Pixel XL as well. I'm done with Google, for this, and other reasons.

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