Physicist & gamer from Alaska. Also on Mastodon: @captainsiscold
I have to say, I was really impressed by how well the Pixel 7a did. At $400 now, that’s a great (somewhat) cheap option for folks, though I do wish its battery life was a bit better…
I’ve got a Pixel 8 non-Pro on the way, so I’m excited to see how it performs compared to my old Galaxy S9 :P
At this point, I’d honestly be fine with that too. Unfortunately it looks like one of the only ones around that has two USB-C ports is the Asus ROG Phone 7 & 7 Ultimate, which both already have a headphone jack too, lol.
I’d love to see those features in phones today; all of those are basically dead in the US market (Xperia 1 V gets two out of three, Zenfone 10 at least gets the 3.5mm jack…might be some cheap Motorola something that still has a jack, as well?).
Me personally, I could even live with just the 3.5mm jack. The whole argument of “it’s for waterproofing/making the phone thinner/insert BS excuse here” falls flat when my Galaxy S9 has a 3.5mm jack and the same IP68 rating as the Pixel 8, yet manages to be thinner.
I really hope they fix the issue with the picture-in-picture video not staying over top of all other windows; that’s the only thing keeping me from using Wayland Firefox right now.
You might be on to something there; I’ll have to give that a look!
Yeah, that seems to be a common theme. Creating timers from Assistant still works fine, but anything with Assistant that has to go through Tasks is basically broken :(
Have you ever found a way to make reminders in Tasks through Google Assistant actually work? When they switched from the Assistant reminders to Tasks, they became so unreliable at showing at the specified time (i.e. “remind me to do ___ at 3pm”) that I can’t use them anymore.
First Android phone was a Motorola Moto G4. Solid phone, great budget buy at the time. Replaced it with a refurbished Galaxy S9 in 202, which is actually still serving me to this day. My S9 is showing its age now, but I’m refusing to buy a phone that does not have a headphone jack, so I’m going to run it into the ground.
First Android device was actually a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet (16GB storage, 1GB of RAM). Ended up running Jellybean, and finally KitKat, off of a microSD card to keep it going. Actually still have it, but flashed to Android 7. Gapps doesn’t install, but I’m impressed it was able to run as well as it did.
Pixels don’t support display out over USB-C? Well, that’s dumb. Surprised I’ve never heard about that being a missing feature before.
Fair enough, adapters do exist, but as you point out, there are situations where that is not ideal. On a long flight, for example, where I might want to charge my phone and also listen to something, or (in my case) someone who does some amateur audio engineering work on the side, where having the ability to simply wire in a device to play some audio is a big plus. My biggest problem is that phones from five years ago could do both wireless and wired headphones just fine, no adapters needed. What have we gained as consumers by the loss of one of those options?
Galaxy S9, and most likely a Sony Xperia 5 IV (or 5 V, since that’s supposed to release in a few days). Honestly I’m using the S9 until it completely gives out on me.
My thoughts on it: cool, now give it a headphone jack again and I might buy it.
I’m not buying a phone that requires $100 wireless earbud DLC (which honestly feel like just another thing to become e-waste in a few years when the battery gives out).
Still on my Galaxy S9 for now, but I’ll be watching for the release of this one. I flatly refuse to buy any phone that does not have a 3.5mm jack, and so far it seems Sony and Asus are the only two players left in that space.
Bitwarden 100% has biometric unlock (at least on Android, can’t speak for other platforms); as mentioned by @pattern, you can set it up to autofill login info in apps and websites. It does sometimes take a bit of time to show up, though.
Anecdotal experience, I know, but I managed to cure my wife of her habit of storing passwords in plaintext on her computer by moving her to Bitwarden, and I’ve had very little in the way of tech support to deal with in that area ever since, so at least for me it passes the “good for non-tech savvy folks” test.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Just got a Pixel 8 (256 GB) for $510 a few weeks ago. I’m good with that, thanks.