My Review of Pixel 3 Android Phone (by a former i-phone customer)

So I got fed up with Apple. I never cared for the company or their products, but when the 5^th generation iPod came out in 2005, I got one. That, in turn, meant getting an Apple ID, iTunes and iStore and all the badly working software that came with it. Not to mention those damned updates.

A few years later I got my first iPhone – the 3G. Same thing, there were really no great alternatives at the time. Still same problems with Apple ID, iTunes, Apple Store, Apple-Only approved apps. My phone got stolen and I replaced it with a 5S. Liked the size of that phone, but the battery didn’t last too long and it was slow. I LOVED the way it fit in y pant or shirt pocket though. HATED the software and the bloated iTunes backups.

Finally, after Apple refused to change my 5S battery I decided to quit Apple and all their trash. So I looked around for the smallest smartphone out there. Not many options at all. In fact all the phones are too big but I learned that was not driven so much by phone sizer per say, but battery life. The bigger the phone, the bigger the battery, and hence the longer the battery life. The best I could find was the Pixel 3. It is roughly 5 ¾  by 2 ½. Way too big, but small compared to most other things. All the companies market their phones as Cameras first

and Phones second. Since my sight has gotten worse, having a high quality camera is not that important to me. All the images, whether taken with my iPhone 5s or my Nikon SLR camera all look equally blurry to me regardless of lens or megapixels.

I ordered a Pixel 3 direct from Google. They happily took my money and the phone arrived by FedEx to my home a few days later. Not a minute too soon as my iPhone figured out what I was doing and decided to have it’s display go nuclear on me.

Setup could not be simpler. Deactivate a few things on the iPhone (iMessage for one). Then remove the AT&T nanoSIM card from the iPhone and pop it into the Pixel. That is it. It was that easy. The Pixel comes with an adapter cable that lets you plug directly into the old iPhone and when you do that it transfers all your apps, photos, music etc to the new phone.

Here is what I really liked – no iTunes software to install. No Apple store. The phone downloads updates over the cellular network or WiFI. No docking to a computer. No activation or trips to the AT&T store. I have it all set up in about an hour. My old iPhone sat there and glared up at me with its dying screen as if to say, “Et tu, Brute?”

The Pixel is fast charging. It uses USB C – which unfortunately means another round of having to buy extra cables. It comes with one USB C to USB C cable, but you need at least one USB C to USB A cable. It also comes with USB C earbuds. My Apple AirPods work fine with the new phone (OK, I did not get rid of EVERYTHING Apple).  

I have been using it for about a week now. I have put my initial pro/con list below. I must say that having the vast resources of Google behind the phone make it an information power house. Maybe a little too powerful. It is spying on me. The first picture I took with the phone was Mylo, my dog, a golden retriever sitting on the floor in my kitchen. I was looking at the picture when I accidentally hit an icon on the screen. I learned that this “Feature” is called Google Lens. It looked at my picture and come bac with a a bunch of images of other Goldens – not just any dog. Also, all of these other Goldens were also, like Mylo, lying on oak work floors (not grass, carpets, tiles, etc). Perhaps more freakily, it then showed me cabinets for sale that looked just like my kitchen cabinets. 

I did not opt in, but seemingly in one press of a button, my phone sent Google my image and they recognized and catalogued my dog and kitchen. Think about this for a second. One image, one button push and a lot of private information had been acquired about me. What kind of dog I have, what kind of floors I have, what kind of cabinets I have. This is frightening. Most of us take more than one picture. This is kind’ve like having a host of company reps in following me around and asking questions, reading my mind. I don’t like it.

I spent about a day going through all the apps and setting, trying to turn of and opt out. The phone is like a stage 4 cancer. It has tendrils and its related metastasis  It is impossible to tell how deep the cancer is. I hear the phone mic is on all the time recording every song and conversation it hears. When I ask what song is playing it comes back in three seconds with the correct answer. This is not an app or opt-in thing. It is built in. I am not sure how I will deal with this going forward. Oh, and everything is GPS tagged. It knows where it is and when it moves. Some of these things can be turned off, but are they really off?

In summary, it is a great phone. Powerful and fast. But I only wish I could trust it. I wish it came with all reporting (spy) features off and let me opt in. At this point, I really have no idea what information it is collecting from me, how it is doing it and what it is doing with that information.

Pros:

• Slim
• Lightweight
• Large screen
• Bright beautiful OLED display
• Good speakers
• Fast!
• Fingerprint scanner on back of phone
• Easy set up
• Intuitive gesture and finger controls
• Good voice recognition and search
• Long battery life (at least longer than my last i-phone)
• Camera?
• Screen shots of real-time phone screen display (easy to use)

Cons:

• Don’t for the long contact list (no easy way to organize)
• Messaging not as convenient or slick as iOS messaging
• No Facetime (although that doesn’t really bother me – I don’t use it)
• Don’t care for Google Play for music. I just want to listen to my own song library
• Glass screen scratched easily before I could buy a screen protector.
• Trust/Security
• Cancer metastasis