Google Pixel owners...tell me what you think

FWIW, Pixel phones all come with a "swipeable" keyboard. I believe it's called "Gboard" and it's the default Pixel keyboard.

 

I went from Samsung to Nexus to Pixel... All of them have had a swipe type keyboard swipe system. In fact, I am trying this replying using Google keyboard swipe.

 

Thanks for the info, guys. One less barrier to dropping $480 on something that's already technically obsolete, I guess.

 

Tech is like cars x10: if you're always chasing the cutting edge you'll just be wasting money and you'll never be satisfied.

I used to be big on getting computer part upgrades and I was always looking for the "next best". Eventually I realized it just doesn't even matter past a point to have the absolute latest and greatest.

Same goes for phones. The pixel may not be the 'best on paper', but it's a very capable & snappy phone for the price point it's listed at. I really can't think of a better phone under $500 than it.

 

Yeah, fully agree. I'd be perfectly happy with keeping my 3 year old Samsung A5 if it didn't keep disconnecting from my home wifi every half hour or so. It just burns me that this is about the only decent phone on the market that isn't ludicrously expensive. Cell phones have essentially become a necessity these days and yet manufacturers keep driving the prices up and up and up. At what point will I have to ditch the phone and get a landline just to keep from going broke?

 

Well I went ahead and did it.
I got $400 credit for my trade in and had 50 bucks of VerizonUp device dollars. So $249.99 total for the phone, opted for the monthly payment plan added to my bill so $10 extra a month for the Pixel 5. It will be here on Tuesday.

 

I heard 2022 Tundras will have a wired phone built into the dash

 

Well, posting from my new Pixel 4A. The external speaker on my old phone died the other day then naturally started working again as soon as I ordered this phone. Oh well. I'll give it some time before I pass judgment on it.

 

I have been running the Pixel 3xl for quite some time. I am also with Verizon and they keep teasing me with that Pixel 5. A friend picked up a 4a when they came out and he hated it. I am like you, in that I am not sure if I want to drop that much coin BUT if they give me close to the deal you got. I may have to run and trade up. Or I may wait until the new year. Disclaimer: My cell phone probably, most likely has more technology than I am aware of. Lol

 

A couple weeks with my new Pixel 5, I must say it's quite nice. It's amazingly fast moving thru apps and across the net. Two things that really stand out though...

Battery life - I know it's a new phone but it is top notch. I can go well over 48 hours before needing to charge it.

Camera - This thing takes amazing pictures. The night mode function I literally have no words for...straight up.

 

STOP teasing me! Lol

 

+1 on the AMAZING camera. Having 2x optical zoom (instead of digital zoom which gets all pixelated and gross) is incredible. I will never purchase any other camera.

 

Think how good your Tundra will look on your new fancy phone!!

 

Well, I've had my Pixel 4A for about a month so here are my thoughts on it so far vs. the 2017 Samsung Galaxy A5 I had before.

Pros:
Battery life seems really good. Hard to do a direct comparison because I'm using my phone a lot more now than I was 3 years ago.
Charging is really fast as long as you plug it into the wall. Very slow if you use a USB-C to USB-A cable to plug it into a computer or something like that, though. I hope the new Tundra gets USB-C ports...
Gboard works way better than Samsung Swype with one exception (see cons below). Far fewer bullshit nonsense words come up and, if they do, you can actually remove them from the dictionary. Samsung would say it was deleting them but then they would show up again the next time I'd try to text. It's a bit harder to get it to put the word Tundra in but much easier to put in Toyota so we'll call that a wash. However, I have yet to come across a phone that deletes text as well as my Samsung Galaxy S5 did. The S5 would delete individual characters initially then, as you held backspace a little longer, it would start deleting entire words. The pace was perfect because you could delete an entire block of text in a reasonable amount of time but you could also stop in the right place if you only wanted to delete part of it. My A5 would only delete single characters but it got going so fast that everything would be deleted in a second. The 4A goes too slowly and the option of swiping on the backspace key to delete one word at a time is so painful that I just end up selecting the text I want to delete (or selecting all).

Cons:
Comes with a bunch of stupid Google apps you can't delete but doesn't come with the ones you might actually want to use like Home and Translate. For example, Google Play Movies is a standard app you can't delete but Google Play Music is not.
It is literally Impossible to edit text after you've typed it. If you go back and try to add a word, it will delete the next word after it each time. So you put a couple extra rows in to give yourself space to work; however, when you delete a row, it moves the cursor to the right one space, so if you just hit backspace again, you'll delete the first letter of the first word in the row. And it was even more painful before I turned off auto correct.
Doesn't have a built in notepad like Samsung does so I have to install Word or something else as annoying to use and then manually transfer my notes over from my old phone.

One other comment: I really hated the "lift to check notifications" feature that would cause the screen to come on if I did something like take my phone out of my pocket and set it down but I was able to figure out how to turn that off.

I don't know why but my fat fingers seem to be way more of an issue with this phone than any of my previous ones. I always end up going to the Tundras.com homepage instead of opening the alerts...

 

Congrats on your new tru-... phone!

 

I thought the G-board on this phone was better than Swype on my Samsungs but now I'm not so sure. It's soooooooo slow to delete anything if you make a mistake while typing. And it absolutely cannot figure out the words "Tundra" or "payload".