449 usd + GST + currency change via transfer wise is about 860nzd approx. It's the lowest price as per CamelCamelCamel.
it has a flagship level processor, tensor g2, developed for AI. Pixel phones have many unique features.
CamelCamelCamel.
have you confirmed this yourself? I was always holding off as heard 5g didnt work well here
5G works on my pixel 6. So presume it's the same for the 7.
Works on my 7 Pro, has for a while.
There a long thread on Geekzone, but the short summary is 5G works on most carriers now, but a few other features like VoWifi is more patchy. Just read the last couple of pages of comments to get the latest info
https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=97&topicid=300…
Can confirm working in Auckland CBD on 5g 2degrees on Google pixel 7.
My friends Vodafone 5g works on his Google pixel everywhere in Auckland :)
I got mine from SUPERO for cheaper, its currently $830, ships from Hong Kong via air freight
What model did you get? Japan ?
yeah its Japan, paid $845 NZD back in June no extra fees
don't think USA is compatible with NZ network, i may be wrong on this
Japan, so I guess won't be able to disable the camera shutter sound?
@Plug: There's a way by flashing it.
Tbh it hasn't bothered me as it's no where near as loud as my old pixel 5
It is. USA model has all the main NZ 3g / Lte and 5G bands including mm
It shows NZ$734.93 after switching Amazon app to show in NZD.
It'll then add GST when you go to checkout
I paid $1100 almost a year ago.
Been really happy with this phone, 5g now available on android 14 beta.
Case selection is really poor but that's about it. No video out over USB C
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/6/23542070/pixel-7-shattered…
Did they ever sort this issue out? I knew they had some type of 2 month window for the warranty for this, however I'm wondering if these phones we get from Amazon will have the same issue?
That being said Amazon is normally pretty sweet to deal with in these circumstances.
is there any forwarding service from aus to Nz?
must be nice to have friends/relatives that dont mind to do this….
Yeah, I follow ozbargain a fair bit, they get some killer deals that us NZders don't seem to ever get :(
Still kinda overpriced imo.
128GB eMMC is tiny and no expandable storage. Your only option is to use e.g. 512GB microSD via OTG. For someone like me with lots of data and app, I go over the 128GB easily. In this day and age, 128GB is nothing. Battery-wise, it's not even 4500mah and that should be the standard nowadays. Slow wireless charging at 20W as well.
Only good thing that Pixel phones have going for is vanilla Android and the software optimizations for the camera. But vanilla Android is easily achieved using custom ROMs and they offer way more customizations and features anyway. I believe you get unlimited Google Photos storage as well, but that can easily be achieved using Magisk mods like Pixelify. Got that on my non Pixel phone with unlimited storage. I'm not really missing out on any of the Pixel features. In fact, some of the Pixel features aren't even available in NZ, such as call screening. But if you know what you're doing, you can get those enabled quite easily on pretty much any device these days.
Maybe if this were at $650 or $700 it'd be decent. Just my 2 cents.
yeah gimped phone
what do you do with 128gb of storage, as google photos is cloud storage?
watch reviews where this phone takes arguably best photos even when compared to top of the line phones which cost 2 to 3 times more,
everything you've pointed bad about this phone isnt even bad, you've created scenarios which dont even happen in everyday use
oh nooo 20w wireless charging, what situation would this be a bad thing?
you hold some kind of personal vendetta against this phone haha what phone do you use?
I don't have a vendetta against this phone, not sure where you got that from. I also did say that this phone would be good at the $650~$700 range. I never said don't get this phone. You seem like a fanboy who perhaps aren't very good at accepting that others have their own opinion.
If you think 128GB of storage is plenty, then why do we even have 1TB or 2TB of SSD storage in our PCs and laptops? Apps and games easily take up lots of storage and yes this applies to Android as well. If you take a Nandroid backup of your entire phone, that easily takes up a good 20~50GB depending on how much data you have. If I lose my phone, I can simply buy the same phone again and restore the nandroid backup in less than 20 mins and everything will be back exactly as it is. I mean literally everything, 1:1 copy. I press a few buttons and the restore process kicks off. This saves a lot of time. Time is money and considering how much I earn on an hourly basis, this is important to me.
If you think 128GB is nothing, then why do companies offer 256GB and 512GB variants? Obviously there's a market for it and hence the reason for these variants, so your point is moot.
And I've already pointed out that the software optimizations for the camera is good on Pixel. I'm well aware of why the Pixel is good and I've owned the first Pixel. But that's really all it's good at. It just has good software optimizations for the camera. It doesn't have the greatest hardware or excel at anything else.
20W charging is slow compared to phones that can charge at 55W or even 100W. For heavy usages, I need to bring my phone back up to 100% quickly without wasting much time waiting. The more money you make, the more you realize how valuable time is. Perhaps you don't understand this, but this is very valuable to a lot of people who run businesses or high-salary jobs.
Also, not all Pixel phones are good. The last generation had lots of issues with bad firmware updates. Look at the MKBHD review of Pixel 6, it had a lot of bugs and many people on Twitter pointed out the same issues as well. It's ironic, because Pixel is supposed to have the best Android optimizations straight from Google. Google is the first party vendor after all.
https://www.droid-life.com/2022/01/12/even-mkbhd-says-hes-do….
I use multiple phones and my current daily driver is Poco F5 Pro. Only cost me $500 NZD. I have 512GB eMMC with 16GB RAM and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, top of the line specs. I don't really care about photography and so camera isn't important to me, but it does have a decent camera. I get 55W charging wirelessly and a 5500mah battery. I use my phones heavily for just about everything and this will easily last me 4 days of continuous screen on time and use, with no charging in between. I run lots of automations on my phone as well, using Linux binaries and shell scripts, etc. Phone runs on MIUI.EU custom ROM and is heavily optimized and de-bloated.
Aside from that, I also have a Galaxy S21, Galaxy Z Fold 4, Poco F1, 2x Samsung Galaxy S8+, iPhone 8, Redmi Note 9T and a few OnePlus devices. Also various Android tablets. Why do I have so many devices? Because I'm loaded I guess.
yes your correct i understand this as poco phone is very popular in India (I am from India) because its specs are high for what price (In India budget phones are cheap if its made in India ) you pay for you and you can get custom rom for this you have to unlock the phone which is easy via mi software there are custom roms you can use as well .
I have done this been there , I used Linux since i was a kid ubuntu , mint fedora etc , then android was build on linux later . Yes you can use many of the g apps on other phones. I have tried this with pixel camera app. from years I understand one thing , I would rather pay more money and forget the hassle of custom roms and rooting phones etc
I am realistic thinking of Iphone for content production Plus it works well with air tags which i use a lot , the only other alternative i can see is pixel phone yes they are bugging and not stable when new but pixel 7 is out since some months google is good at fixing software , the camera experience on pixel is still better then any other phone except iphone and for my preference of photos pixel came out to be on top .
I am not a fanboy I work on two jobs about 6o hours a week and study full time i cant be bothered with things now and then i want to spend time with kids i recently moved to mac os ie macbook air and apple m1 ipad , we read a lot of books and do certain things for which apple is just amazing yes linux has good apps as well but apple is like every thing just works very well . i still use linux on my thinkpad and will run vps and home server on linux with docker apps for pihole and adgurd , jellyfin etc
but trust me if i had the money i will go for iphone or pixel phone i use a cheap moto phone from India its good but well its time for a better change
@desikiwi: I run custom roms and custom recovery on all my phones. So if I had a Pixel 7, I would do the same. In some sense, custom ROMs are better than stock. At the very least, I would keep stock rom on Pixel 7, but root it and flash custom recovery on it.
Basically, my point is that this process doesn't change for me regardless of what phone I use. It's not a lot of effort, should take at most 20~30 minutes to do everything. Why do I invest the time in doing this? Because it's worth it and helps you save so much more time later on. By having backups of everything, I can easily restore in under 30 mins. Everything can be automated as well to an extent. It's not a time consuming task.
@NovaAlpha: I have used custom roms on Xiaomi and not everything works well there is always something which has issues with some exceptions, yes the actual flashing only takes may be as above but researching and trying things , take time is it worth the time yes and no and may be . Time has value and it takes a greater amount of time and effort to make thi gs work on custom roms + backups and then so on if I have to do this I would rather use iPhone all apps and everything just works well life is peaceful .
@desikiwi: What doesn't work exactly? If you know what you're doing, none of this takes much time. And if you truly know what you're doing, you wouldn't switch from Android to iOS. Objectively speaking, you can't automate things on iOS to the level that you can with Android. Ever heard of MacroDroid or Tasker? Or even running Linux shell scripts on Android? You can automate and customize so many things, it just doesn't compare. And you only need set up automations and backups just once. Sounds to me that you don't really have a good setup at all. I don't have as much time as I used to before. The older I get and the more money I make, the more time is important to me. But it's exactly of this reason that I think having a good process for all of this is crucial to saving more time. Again, you need to know what you're doing.
But anyway, that's your choice and opinion.
@NovaAlpha: I just sign in to google and hey presto there's all my contacts, apps, photos etc.
Then I sign in to 365 and all the work stuff is there.
I guess the most inconvenient thing is pairing it to headphones + car again
Dunno what else people use a phone for really haha.
Much better than the old titanium backup days!
@Grandma: Yeah, that's really light usage.
Like I said, I'm a power user. I use my phone heavily for just about everything. I use it to run servers, development stuff, hacking and just about everything else. Also have a bunch of ChatGPT plugins and apps using my OpenAI API key running on it, including some bots for Discord, etc. I've actually created my own wrapper for ChatGPT well before they released the official Android app.
I also have a lot of purchases on Google Play. I have a single "common" account that is shared amongst friends and families. By doing this, we all just need to make purchases on one single account and everyone else will get to enjoy the purchases. Sure, there are some apps/games/movies that allow Family Sharing, but not all of them support this. The trick is to set up your "common" account on all your Android devices and then Google Play Store + Google Play Services will be able to validate the licenses for your apps/games/movies from Play Store via that common account. You still get to use your other Google accounts just fine.
Speaking of which, I have a couple of Google accounts. One is my main one, one is for work/job stuff, the other for Trademe, one other one for real estate (I own a couple of properties and so I have a dedicated account for that) and lastly, the "common" account. Why do I have separate accounts and not make use of Gmail aliases or Bulc.Club for dynamic email alias creation? Well, I do use them, but I also have other reasons. Mainly because I have lots of automations and use Google App Scripts for each account to do certain things, it's hard to explain but that's the best setup that works for me.
Then I have about 200+ apps/games that I need to install and a lot of them require configurations as well. Basically, anything that requires logging into accounts, configuring settings to disable analytics and telemetry or data collection, etc etc, those are all hassles. Not to mention all your Wifi SSIDs that you've connected to, they'll need to be reconnected and entered password. The list goes on.
With a simple 20 minutes nandroid backup, literally everything 1:1 is restored as is. The backup itself is encrypted so I don't need to worry about losing my phone with my backups on there. In fact, I can issue a remote wipe via a webhook. I also have automations on my phone that run based on certain conditions, such as when the phone is not unlocked for more than 24 hours, it will prompt me for remote wipe and if no answer in another 3 hours, then wipe.
Anyway, that's just a very dumbed down version. I'm an extreme power user, not your average typical user who just uses Facebook and play Candy Crush or whatever the hell old people do these days.
So by your argument your Poco phone sucks too, only 30W wireless charging not 55W or even 100W,
Poco F5 only came out few months ago vs PIxel 7 which is heading to almost a year old now.
Yeah Pixel 6 sucked, dont see how that relates to this model which is highly praised by many tech reviewers,
the camera alone is worth the money not to mention amazing OS
128gb of data is plenty for every day average user, with google one and google photos cloud storage available
still have no idea what youre storing on your phone that requires soo much space
same argument for wireless charging, average person charges their phone at night while sleeping, so zero need for fast wireless charging
i call bs that your phone lasts for 4 days on single charge when you seem to be going through lots of data/screen time as you proclaim
and why do you need fast wireless charging if your phone lasts 4 days, you could use this amazing tech called a charging cable too which is even faster
I've owned PIxels since before it was called a pixel and skipped every second gen, i also have a second (work) phone, which have ranged from Samsung Galaxy to Iphones and i still prefer PIxel OS/camera all day everyday. again personal preference, but a lot of tech reviewers would agree on this point it would seem
Only thing that annoys me about Pixel is the physical fingerprint reader is gone and using the screen one which isn't as responsive,
Would love to try asus zenfone 10(as recommended by MKBHD), but again NZ market is so blinded by Apple and Samsung that end user gets shafted with options and cost of alternative options.
End of the day it comes down to personal preference, but you saying this phone isn't worth it because of 128gb storage and 30w wireless charging is ridiculous. so best phone is one with biggest storage and fastest wireless charging??
@Kdzc83: You fail at reading. I've stated that I travel a lot, which means I need my phone to stay alive while I travel. I don't always have access to a charging point and yes I do have a portable battery bank, but sometimes it's not enough. If you have a crap phone that drains battery like crazy, it doesn't help.
My phone sure as hell charges faster than yours. I never stated it's perfect. But it's $500 compared to $864.19.
128GB of data is tiny. Objectively, your point is moot. Go run everything you own under 128GB then. The fact that the world use 1TB~2TB storage as standard and retails them proves my point.
Again, I said the phone is OK at $650~$700 and so my point is that at the current advertised price, it's not worth it in my opinion.
As for whether you believe my phone can last 4 days straight, I don't care. I'm a power user, I reverse engineer and crack Android apks and tweak Android OS and optimize kernels, among various other things. And I sure as hell know how to get most of the Pixel features on my phone, without a Pixel. I bet you don't even have Call Screen on your phone, because that's locked to specific countries. Guess what, I have it on mine. People can call me and automatically get screened by a Google assistant voice in the background.
The Pixel series are MEH at best and it's only good because of the special software optimizations for the camera for the most part. That's really the only #1 reason why people get the Pixel, because its camera is that good. Yes, I do love the camera and I love vanilla Android for the most part, but for the price, the rest of the hardware ain't that good. Again, this is normally more than $864.19 and so it's not even worth it when you can get flagship hardware phones at $500. That's a $364.19 difference and that's huge.
I cbf reading all your other points. You fail at even making a good argument and replying properly on so many levels. Keep being a fanboy man. I'm done with this discussion.
@NovaAlpha: Also, the 128GB becomes an issue if you're not using a Pixel phone to backup your photos/videos. Basically, you'd always have to get a Pixel if you want to keep uploading photos and videos to your unlimited storage. The Pixel 6 was horrible and had multiple bad reviews across the board. How do you know if the next generation of Pixel devices will be any good? You're basically locked into the ecosystem just like the iOS sheep users.
I doubt you'd always stay on a Pixel device. 128GB is really tiny these days and you're delusional if you think that's enough. It is NOT industry standard anymore, we don't live in bloody 2010 mate. It's like you're still living under a rock if you think 128GB is more than enough.
Of course, you can "Pixelify" other devices, just like how I get unlimited storage on my non-Pixel device. But that depends on your skill level and knowledge. And that really only deals with photos and videos. Anything else will still take up eMMC storage, like your nandroid backups, etc.
@NovaAlpha: Idk why I'm engaging haha! Not much better to do while waiting for bread to cook!
I did a stint at Noel Leeming. We barely moved the tb iPhones and the tb Samsung flagship skus were only available at launch then immediately discon… Except the folds, naturally. Even laptops, I don't think I ever sold a single SSD laptop with a tb of storage, certainly not a MacBook anyway.
My phone is 128 gb and I've got 47gb used. My iPad is 512 and it's got 83gb used… Mostly in system files, whatever that means. Laptop doesn't count because work stuff…. Back at uni I fit a degree into the 2gb free Dropbox tier. Low storage in apple certainly exists to funnel you into renting storage from them. Samsung don't offer really the same thing, nor do Oppo so it's difficult to see how them selling 128gb for A series or 256gb for galaxy S phones is consistent with your points.
@Grandma: Put it this way. Back in the day, you could put a Powerpoint slide on a floppy disk. Then came along CDs, then USB flashdrives with 128MB. People said that was enough back then. Games on playstation or whatever were less than a few hundred megabytes.
Technology evolves over time, requirements are different. Games, apps and even work data can easily grow to gigabytes. Being stuck with 128GB is just 2010 caveman stuff. Don't be a caveman, be better.
And you don't seem like someone with lots of data and someone who uses tech heavily, so I'm not surprised you find 128GB plenty. Objectively, most phones come with at least 128GB now instead of 32GB. Remember when we had phones that just had 32GB? Again, the industry proves my point. It's only a matter of time before the industry moves that baseline to 256GB and by then, you'll come to realize just how much data is being consumed and stored in this world.
Also, "system files" is basically the ROM. Whether it's iOS or Android, it's all the unpacked firmware into System or Data partition that you can't touch (without root anyway). As phones keep getting newer firmware updates with more features, the size of the system grows bigger and hence why you have a lot of "wasted" space and not a lot left to store actual user data.
I've had a fair few phones over the last three to four years.
Oneplus 6t, Oneplus 7 pro, iphone 11 pro max, iphone 13, samsung note 20 ultra, samsung z flip 3 and now pixel 7.
Of those, oneplus 7 pro is definitely my favourite (or it was until the colorOS thing happened). Pixel 7 is much better than anything else in that list to me. 128gb is fine, oodles more than the 64gb you used to get with Apple. I just whack my phone on a wireless charger at night.
The cost difference to make a 512gb vs a 128gb phone is negligible; the more expensive tiers exist to generate money. You're also not getting 4 days continuous SOT lol.
And umm, a quick question, why is such a high roller even bothering to type this out on cheapies? … aside from the 'clever' user name I guess
@Grandma: I do get 4 days continuous SOT. Magisk + Xposed modules to make doze enabled for Google Play Services, among other system apps that normally can't be battery optimized. Doze parameters are also tweaked to go into deep doze mode, so that the whole device sleeps properly. Notifications etc still work. I also have various other tweaks applied as well and a few other shell scripts. Runs on custom rom and custom kernel that's optimized for the phone. Undervolted and underclocked CPU during deep sleep. No performance loss. Essentially, the wakelocks on the phone are around 5~10 every 6~8 hours.
I could go on, but it's not like an Android non-power user would understand.
As for why am I on Cheapies, why not? I've been poor before, I worked my way to the top. Cheap deals aren't exclusive to the 99% you know. And you don't get rich by wasting money either.
@NovaAlpha: Right.
I did the custom rom / kernel thing back when phones weren’t that great (lg g3 was a fantastic phone with awful battery and broken ui if you changed the dpi scaling to something actually reasonable). Nowadays you just buy a phone and it works better than most of the third party roms. I would (and have) personally just bought older flagship phones than have bought cheap new ones and spent time dicking around getting the ads etc off of them. It's a bit weird to gatekeep phones, I use mine for hotspotting calls and car noise. Anything work related demands the laptop!
If I had more time, maybe, lol.
But, you’re not getting 96 hours SOT or even 50 hours SOT on a charge lol. Maybe if your phone were a kindle?
@Grandma: It depends on a lot of things. If you're on ColorOS for example, then it's worse than a custom rom. Way worse. And if you care about privacy, then some of the official stock roms are terrible and aren't even patched. Some of the phones aren't software optimized either and fall out of the Android OS updates after just 1~2 years. Phone manufacturers don't provide lifetime OS updates because they want people to buy newer models that come with the latest software + hardware features. They also may intentionally handicap older models. Just look at the battery issue on iPhones. They had to pay a fine for that because what they did was shady behaviour.
The thing is, more people are noobs. Most people think that as long as the apps and the phone doesn't crash, works relatively smoothly, then it's "fine". That's just being a sheep and that's why a lot of people get iPhones. It's "easy" and it's just a single button to learn. That's why you get iPhones for your parents and your grandparents. Most people don't know how to set up their own cloud storage or NAS or whatever, so they pay $$$ every month just so they can upload a couple of gigabytes of data to their iCloud. And guess what, their iCloud account gets hacked and that's why you have The Fappening, where you can find leaked celeb photos. It's "easy" for them because all they do is pay a monthly sub to use an easy service, but something being easy doesn't always equate to good.
Anyway, I run most of my phones on stock rom but rooted. At the very least, they all have custom recoveries installed. If you were to lose your phone, how long would it take you to get it back up and running to literally the way it was? I can guarantee you that it will only take me 20 minutes. All my data and all my settings, all my messages, call logs, app settings, literally everything will be restored 1:1 copy. That's the difference between you and me. I don't waste time going through menus and sign-in manually, because that's dumb. That's a complete waste of time and each time you get a new phone, good luck spending time setting up everything manually again.
Learn to automate things, be better. Get good.
And if you were any pro at this stuff, you'll know that 50 hours SOT isn't far-fetched at all. We live in this day and age where 128GB is tiny compared to the standard 256GB~1TB (or 1TB~2TB if we're talking PCs) of storage that we see nowadays. Again, just a couple of years ago we were on 32GB phones. The baseline changes over the years and my point is objectively proven time and time again. Unfortunately, there will always be boomers who lag behind on everything and never able to keep up with the rest of the world. There's probably someone out there who still think CDs and DVDs are enough and there's no need for a SSD. But hey, you believe what you want to believe, whatever makes you happy.
how long would it take you to get it back up and running to literally the way it was?
I have to set it up wihtout a google acc, go into my pw manager, copy my google account and it pulls down a backup. Afaik call logs, messages, some settings come down. Would you not be concerned that your credentials or login token or whatever can just be pulled down? Not particularly familiar with how android apps handle auth, but that's a pretty basic security concern on web. But I don't think the time it takes me to move into a phone is greater than the time taken to flash twrp would be. Samsung publish a really decent migration tool, as do oppo / oneplus which afaik goes a bit deeper. Also I like colorOS, notifications suck but everything else is nice, especially on the flagship phones.
I can't, for the sake of an early morning google, find the power usage of a regular display on it's own, but maintaining a wireless connection, bt and wifi are significant drains.
256gb is by far the standard for PCs in 2023. The most popular laptop in the world is a 256gb sku, almost all of our guys run i5/8gb/256 or better cpu/memory, the work they're doing isnt actually using much storage. Everything I work with daily is a cloud vm and the guys still running on prem exclusively are being migrated to cloud. My Desktop has a couple of 1tb m.2s in it and my nas has a couple of 2tb platter drives, but if I didnt play the odd game or run a jellyfin server, I'd have no use for this space.
Back to my NL days, only really iphone people tend to care about software updates, almost everyone else considers them a nuisance. I've never been asked about android versions in that job. The people that know know and they (dont shop at noel leeming lol) wouldnt mention it.
@Grandma: TWRP is so easy to flash, takes literally minutes and it's a one time job.
If you're using the right kernels and tweaks, you can set the display to super low power usage. Always On Display setting obviously controls the refresh rate and power draw in order to allow that feature to work. I don't use Always On Display, but can simply set it to run at 10hz when the phone is idle or in deep sleep. My automations change a lot of parameters on the phone, including turning off location/bluetooth/wifi/mobile data based on multiple conditions, it's heavily automated.
You only get 15GB of storage in your Google account and it is shared with other services, like Gmail. Most people I know already have a couple of GBs of used storage coming from Gmail. Grandparents like to send photos and whatever stuff to each other and that bloats up their storage easily. On top of that, apps that you backup to your Google account will store a bit of stub data, so that when it gets downloaded, it can download the full APK easily. The more stuff you backup, the less space you have and 15GB is absolutely tiny. I also backup phone recordings to my Google Drive, among other things. Backup and restore from Google account just isn't ideal. And once you enable Google backup, it'll just do a sync every now and then and that drains battery life to an extent. I like to have full control over a lot of these processes. If you've ever monitored Google Play Services, you'll see that it does a lot of calls and runs heaps of activities and services in the background and I hate that. That's why some people use microG and fOSS on their Android, completely free from using any GAPPS.
I also don't store passwords in my Google account, because you can't use them unless you're on Android, or in Chrome. If you're using say Firefox or whatever, you can't easily get those passwords. I prefer dedicated apps like Bitwarden for this.
Also, I know some people with lots of data in their Whatsapp and Wechat. I'm talking at least 20~50GBs. These are normal users who don't know how to manage their own data, don't know how to set up the right backups, etc. Where are you going to find the free 50GB of cloud storage? You can't simply backup Wechat data to OneDrive or Dropbox or whatever, it doesn't work that way.
People share photos and videos with each other and those data are stored in a partition (/data/app) that isn't accessible to the normal user, unless you have root. If you have root, then you can backup those data quite easily at a file level. But it's much easier on a block level, you can just do it using a custom recovery like TWRP. Anyway, there are always going to be scenarios where you can't simply backup everything to your 15GB of drive storage, unless you want to start paying subscription to use it, but then you'd just be wasting money.
Again, this goes back to people being dumb. I know so many people who pay for iCloud storage and not actually fully utilizing the storage. They waste their money and then complain why they are paying for so many subscriptions for so many different services. It's because it's "easy" to set those things up initially, but then you end up with this issue. Easy doesn't always mean good.
Pixel is good for ai machine learning based or rather the photos and videos on this pixel is amazing as per blind tests which I did I found pixel 6 a and pixel 7 etc my pick front camera was iPhone for me but regular photo was pixel , then the camera app has some new special features great for vlogger blogger youtuber etc ,.
You can also do dictation speech to text for which I use otter but this phone it's inbuilt
The apps on pixel run you can say best when it comes to Android phones as it's used by developers to built apps . Etc
It also knows what music is playing in background , my kids and my family listens to lot of music
Those apps on Pixel aren't unique to Pixel. You can get those on other phones as well. In fact, there are GAPPS packages that you can flash to get them, or even just download from Play Store.
Sure, but it’s my understanding that the way that they’re written leverages some hardware specific stuff in pixel nowadays.
Runs the same elsewhere, but you don’t get the big matrixy npu stuff on everything. They’re not open source so nobody can say for sure
@Grandma: You can easily decompile an Android apk to look at it. That's why there are mods for the Google Camera, so that some of its "exclusive" features can actually be used on other phones, even super old models. Most apps aren't exclusive to Pixel either. The live transcription app that desikiwi spoke of can literally be downloaded on any other phone. 99% of those apps were already released before Pixel 7 with the Tensor chip came along, so there's nothing exclusive about them. I'd be curious to know exactly what feature you're referring to that you can't get on any other phone.
Also, a lot of those are just soft-locked settings. Unlimited storage in Google Photos is actually not hardware locked to Pixel, it's software. You can unlock this super easily and even custom ROMs like Pixel OS come with this setting already included, so you don't even have to do anything. The Call Screen feature is region locked to a few countries only. Even if you own a Pixel phone, you can't use Call Screen because it's not supported in NZ. But the setting can still be enabled and this will work on other devices.
@NovaAlpha: You can decompile, but it's not the same. You don't know what the apis are actually doing on the sys end. Pixel experience and the pixel addons are not open source afaik, Im not particularly familiar with how abstracted ml or ai is in android. Computationally, anything runs on anything, but the hardware acceleration for big ass matrices is the selling point of tensor afaik.
To many, a phone that just works and dosent have to be dicked around with is a selling point. I had an iphone 13, and while frustrating on occaison, everything just working is honestly a bit of a breath of fresh air coming from the mess of duplicated services you get on a samsung.
Google cloud storage amounts would almost certainly be server side?
@Grandma: In order for ML to work, it needs to rely on trained data, which means your phone would need to lookup against the trained data quite frequently. All the Tensor chip does is provide some additional gimmick features on your phone, such as allowing you to remove certain objects in your photo, etc. ML and AI is still pretty in its infancy though, so it's not like the Tensor chip is revolutionary. To me, the main selling point of a Pixel is really just all around its photos and camera features and capabilities, but that's really about it. It's a good phone, but kinda MEH at $864.
How is Pixel Experience not open source? It's based on AOSP. Android devs contribute and collaborate with each other on these projects, you're not gonna have some random team of people who dedicate their time to develop a closed source ROM. They don't get paid for that and how would you even collaborate with people you don't know, if the source is closed?
https://github.com/PixelExperience
As for Google cloud storage, it's a bit tricky. Technically, Google Photos use Google Drive storage as the backend, but it has its own isolated space. You can't get unlimited storage in Google Drive, but you can get unlimited storage in Google Photos. It's really just a soft-lock. But hey, we've been going over this many times already. To believe something, you best try it yourself. Get a cheap old spare phone and flash Pixel Experience on it, or Pixelify magisk module, or some other ones.
Does it have duel physical sim? I can't see it in the Amazon descriptions.
Nah, 2nd can be esim
May be worth considering now that 5G finally works on Pixel 7.