all right so i usually keep you all
updated on this but a lot of people ask
and maybe you don't know so i have
access to a lot of different phones and
the question is usually is what phone do
you use on the daily so the phone that i
keep coming back to after i review a
phone for the past
year and a half on android has been
samsung's galaxy s21 ultra so
it's a pretty long time for me a lot of
phones have come out since then
including the s22 ultra but i keep
coming back to this one you know it's
the design the display the cameras are
rock solid the software is really good
full of features it's been great now a
lot of people assumed that it would
change to the pixel series when that
came out in october
and i really like the phones but as i
said in my review it's not perfect
and then slowly ever since it came out
it's gotten more
and more buggy now that's always one of
the challenges of reviewing something
right people usually own their phone for
years but i have to try to experience as
much of this as possible in one to two
weeks and then condense it all down into
a 10 or 20 minute video or in the pixels
case 21 minutes and 49 seconds damn but
yeah a couple weeks and a couple months
after the review period
it slowly started unraveling more and
more bugs started showing up and i'm not
really sure why i can't really tell you
exactly why it's happening but i do know
now that the pixels seem to be more
susceptible to it matter of fact this
exact thing this situation we're going
through now has happened before when i
was using the pixel 2 xl
i had the same thing happen the bugs got
worse and worse up until the point where
i stopped using it and switched to i
think it was some oneplus phone that was
performing well at the time and i made a
video about it so i'm not sure what
makes the pixel so much more susceptible
to it than other phones but i was hoping
that this time you know having their own
tensor design chip and getting those
quick software updates straight from
google would maybe help alleviate that
this time
but i was wrong so this phone came out
in october by january i was tweeting
that my pixel 6 pro has slowly gotten so
buggy since launch that i can no longer
recommend it at 900 which is still how
much it cost by the way straight from
google so that combined with the botched
january software update had me giving up
a little bit and i put my sim card back
into the s21 ultra which by the way got
that january security update before the
pixel did but here we are in april so
it's been a couple months and a couple
successful software updates later and
hey if i'm gonna publicly talk about the
downfall of the pixel then they put out
some software updates to fix it i wanna
know about it i wanna test it so i've
done that six months after launch now
i've got my sim card back in the pixel
and i've been using it
and while it's better than it was
it's still not enough to change my
opinion on it so my overall thoughts on
this phone are pretty much the same as
the review when it came out like i said
i do actually really like this design
which has proved to be polarizing some
people love it some people hate it i'm
into it and you can see all the use now
i did get it pretty scratched up i got a
big gash a pretty deep one on the top
left corner of my display but that's par
for the course for me i don't use phone
cases all the time so yes it still
collects dust all the way around those
cameras yes it's showing normal wear and
tear from the months of being in and out
of pockets on tables and tossed around
all this is normal and the industrial
design itself is still held up it's very
solid but the question is what were the
things that were specifically going
wrong with the user experience on this
phone that made it such a pain to use
luckily i wrote them down
so
the big ones for me were number one it's
120 hertz display but it was constantly
constantly slowing down to way below
that way below 90 often below 60 which
was annoying this big stuttery
animations all the time opening and
closing apps
so that was my number one problem
the camera oh lock screen and auto
brightness were also both terrible no
matter how dim of a room i was in it
would never lower the brightness enough
even though auto brightness was on
the fingerprint reader
is slow
compared to the others and the camera is
slowing down so since then i'm now on
the march security update and the
constant frame drops are 95 fixed and
the camera app is back to normal launch
speed love that that was a huge one for
me but the auto brightness is still bad
and the fingerprint reader is still slow
compared to the others also often when
i'm in a dark room and i turn the
flashlight on for some reason it always
decides to raise the brightness of the
display way up why i don't know i'm
still in a dark room and i turn the
flashlight on so clearly it's a dark
room but maybe there's some sort of
light leakage into the ambient light
sensor or something here i think that
could be fixed with software but we'll
see
some other things that didn't make it
into my tweet though the modem and just
overall cell connectivity is noticeably
worse than other phones which affects
battery life so i have a i have a dead
zone that i drive through on the way to
work every day and i can kind of notice
with each different phone i'm testing
how long it takes to regain signal for
the maps app to work again and this
takes longer than any other phone and
i've also had issues with wi-fi calling
just that feature specifically
and in this studio with double thick
glass and all this acoustic treatment
the signal in here isn't great already
to start with and so i rely on wi-fi
calling and that feature has not let me
make a call in like two days in a row
here which is pretty bad and there's
still a bunch of subtle stuff that's not
necessarily a bug but just affects the
overall feel of the phone like swiping
between the home screen and google page
should always be pretty smooth that's a
basic animation
but it's not on the pixel awkwardly
enough other android phones like the s21
ultra have no problem with this and i
also with this phone have had a weird
bluetooth streaming
random bug to my car like i'll be
listening to music and it'll skip like a
second of audio like a cd haven't had a
phone do that in a long time but like i
said the newest updates have reduced a
lot of the like performance problems and
the stuttering and the animations that
really made it feel bad
so
it's better than it was
but if the acceptable level of bugginess
for a 900 phone was like here
it used to be up here
and now it's
here it's still worse than it should be
but
they have made an improvement but that
being said this is still a very strange
trajectory
for the user experience of a smartphone
like typically you get a phone and for
the first year at least it's peaches
nothing's wrong and then as it ages it
slowly goes downhill over time
but it feels like the pixels
age concerningly quickly
and google has to try to stay on top of
that with like a frantic software update
or two very early
very odd so at this point i've given the
pixel 6 pro another chance and i still
don't think people should be buying the
pixel 6 pro for 900 bucks
but you know it's been six months so now
i'm starting to look forward right so we
have a couple pixel 6a
rumors popping up here and there that'll
probably come out this summer that's
probably going to be another phone with
this first gen tensor chip probably a
plastic body 1080p display maybe 90
hertz that would be nice probably one to
two cameras and that'll be their budget
phone for the middle of the year but i'm
very interested in the next generation
of tensor chip and the next pixel maybe
it's just because i'm optimistic maybe
it's just because i am i trust that
google will finally buckle down the
google phone experience and deliver
something good
but yeah that's this is something we're
going to have to keep an eye on now is
the way
pixels age over time seems to
consistently
be very different from the way we expect
other normal phones to age but hey
that's just one more factor to consider
when reviewing these things for now like
i've said my sim card is gonna be again
back in the s21 ultra until the next
review anyway but let me know what your
thoughts are in the comments section
below let's talk about it either way
thanks for watching
catch you guys the next one
peace
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