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I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

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Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#151

I know a lot of this is anecdotal... My Mom who is 77, has had a few Androids. Always calling her Sons to help fix her phone. She bought cheap phones for a couple of hundred dollars, but always limited the Ram, but had plenty of storage. WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook would constantly fill it up and many times you'd have to clear out all the apps, clear the storage on the phone, etc, etc. Then I would have to explain to h…

My aunt bought a 'cheap' iPhone (SE, 16GB, $450) and ran out of storage the first month...

My wife once bought an 8 GB iPhone 4, and regretted it pretty much immediately. That was a horrible experience, and I was stunned that apple would sell such a thing.

So far I've learned it pans out this way for iOS devices:

- 16 GB: the bare minimum for any sort of user. Don't expect to be taking a lot of pictures or use a lot of apps without a lot of storage twiddling.

- 32 GB: fine for regular app use, avoid if you want to take a lot of pictures. I find this to be the sweet spot for coffee table iPads.

- 64 GB: the baseline for people who take a lot of pictures and videos. Anything less and there's too much storage management involved.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#152

A question for the author about the blog page: why did you set body {visibility: hidden} and prompt some people with a blank page? I don't know which one of the privacy extensions I'm using probably prevented some JavaScript to turn it into visibility: visible, but why shouldn't it start as visible since the beginning?

Yeah, but if you leave JavaScript disabled how can the trackers fire?

I assume that's the real reason for all these pages which would work just fine without JavaScript requiring it.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#153

I know a lot of this is anecdotal... My Mom who is 77, has had a few Androids. Always calling her Sons to help fix her phone. She bought cheap phones for a couple of hundred dollars, but always limited the Ram, but had plenty of storage. WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook would constantly fill it up and many times you'd have to clear out all the apps, clear the storage on the phone, etc, etc. Then I would have to explain to h…

Not sure what a 64GB _sim_ is? Did you mean a memory card? Or is it some funky US thing I haven't heard about before. Sim cards here have marginal storage at best.

But to the point: Glad to hear that her situation improved when going from a $200 to a $800 phone (or whatever those cost), but I wonder what the story had been if she had gone to a $800 Android instead - with e.g. 128GB of internal storage.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#154
post #94
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping you deleting photos and videos, or even whole albums in the app? Or syncing photos off and deleting on sync? Anyway, I'd genuinely be interested in how Android or Android apps solve his problem in better ways. For a lot of the other issues, it seems like this is a problem with the apps though, not the OS. If Facebook or a podcast app is hogging space, it's up to the app to provide options to manage it…

Android has an overview by app where you can a) delete the app entirely, b) delete the app's data entirely or c) delete the app's cache. C solves most issues described here.

Why doesn't it delete / trim the caches automatically? If they are safe to be deleted by the user at any time, the device itself should be clever enough to clear the space.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#155
post #152

A question for the author about the blog page: why did you set body {visibility: hidden} and prompt some people with a blank page? I don't know which one of the privacy extensions I'm using probably prevented some JavaScript to turn it into visibility: visible, but why shouldn't it start as visible since the beginning?

Yeah, but if you leave JavaScript disabled how can the trackers fire? I assume that's the real reason for all these pages which would work just fine without JavaScript requiring it.

Yes, I'm sure that's it and not the fact that no one builds for the 0.1% of users with javascript disabled.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#156

I know a lot of this is anecdotal... My Mom who is 77, has had a few Androids. Always calling her Sons to help fix her phone. She bought cheap phones for a couple of hundred dollars, but always limited the Ram, but had plenty of storage. WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook would constantly fill it up and many times you'd have to clear out all the apps, clear the storage on the phone, etc, etc. Then I would have to explain to h…

Sounds like you just needed to buy Mom an Android device with decent storage - and/or maybe a "flagship" device that isn't left hung out to dry. I too have family with shitty Androids. My Mom runs an iPhone 5 that is so far behind she's afraid to update it at this point (holding out for new iPhone) I also have family with flagship Android devices - completely different exp.

> and/or maybe a "flagship" device that isn't left hung out to dry.

I think you are missing the point there. She's on a fixed income. The iPhone 6 is on contract. When she got it, it was £0 down and £17.99 a month. Compared that to a much higher costs per month for a flagship phone.

Not only that, once the 2 years has been up. She'll just get another contract and an iPhone 8. Rinse and repeat and she'll always have a decent iPhone. It doesn't need to be the best one.

Also, she isn't a power user. A flagship phone is completely wasted on her.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#158

Interesting to read this since I'm considering getting an iPhone; so far I've only used Android. Does anyone have comments who has done the switch in that direction?

I haven’t switched, but I often use my fiancée’s iPhone (which isn’t at all the same thing, I know).

The way that I put it is that the iPhone is a better smart phone; Android is a better pocket computer. If you want something which is basically a small communications device, which does one thing at a time & gets out of your way, then you probably want an iPhone. If you want a flexible, capable device which does many different things and respects your choices, then you want Android.

Things I like about iOS: on brand-new hardware, it feels snappier than Android on similarly brand-new hardware; the experience within a single app is less distracting.

Things I like about Android: real Firefox; headphone jacks; ability to sideload apps; open source apps; back button; task switching; less lock-in (iCloud, I’m looking at you); doesn’t make me want to chuck the phone at a wall after using it for three minutes.

I trust Apple more than Google, but I trust me even more than Apple, and with Android I can have a mostly Google-free existence, while with an iPhone I cannot have an Apple-free existence. For me, the choice is easy.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#159

I develop on Macs, and really like using iOS devices. The iPad is my tablet of choice.... But I've always stuck with Android phones, since the G1 (and a lot of jokes at the time). I think it's because the app interoperability was designed in from the start, something that only appeared gradually in iOS. I find a lot of value in workflow companion apps. So when I get a text message, it gets archived to Gmail with a la…

> every incoming/outgoing/missed call puts an entry with the details and timestamp in my calendar, so I can look back for reference Now that's a cool trick. How exactly do you do that?

Ah, that's an app I stumbled upon called Calltrack. I installed it a while back, and it's been pretty reliable.

Re: I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report

#160

I know a lot of this is anecdotal... My Mom who is 77, has had a few Androids. Always calling her Sons to help fix her phone. She bought cheap phones for a couple of hundred dollars, but always limited the Ram, but had plenty of storage. WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook would constantly fill it up and many times you'd have to clear out all the apps, clear the storage on the phone, etc, etc. Then I would have to explain to h…

> is 77 > Never heard from her again.

You might want to check up on her to make sure it's just the phone.

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