I had originally planned to upgrade to the 5, but decided to switch to the OnePlus 8 as I was pretty underwhelmed by the 5's specs.
Other than that, which I'd call self inflicted since I've had the phone for years and dropped it a few times and hike a lot, I've had no issues. Maybe the 2 had better QC?
Disassembled the phone, and took off the power button from the main board. Turned out the soldering job inside the power button was badly done, and the looping was due to a piece of solder that had come loose and was shorting the connection.
So now I have a totally functional nexus 5, but to use the power button I have to stick a piece of tin foil down inside where the power button used to be. I have a mod on there that added a 4th home row button which covers all but the 'on' functions of that button.
May be easier than finding tin foil (or aluminum foil).
Barely 1.5 years after being purchased new. Combined with the fact that the battery on it was already shoddy and only degraded significantly with time, I legitimately would have to keep my charger always on me, or I might get stuck with a dead phone.
2 of my friends who bought Nexus 6P around the same time also had issues, with one hitting the infamous bootloop issue, and another one experiencing battery issues and automatic shutdown similar to mine.
"I'm always here when you need me", moped the lonely Sony Xperia in a distant corner of the room.
I can't get that on any other Android phone, and this year's Pixel seems good but not top-of-line. Honestly I wouldn't upgrade unless otherwise incentivized, but I'm making the switch to iPhone for the first time. This is a bummer since Android is finally a great platform.
I actually had this happen and made Google replace it out of warranty (they sent a refurb).
* https://support.google.com/pixelphone/forum/AAAAb4-OgUsBZo6t...?
* https://support.google.com/pixelphone/forum/AAAAb4-OgUs4rkbD...
In the end I ended up returning the CEX (2nd hand store) phone to Google who then sent a new device to me. Though I was glad to get it sorted in that way (and do love the device itself - when it works, it works great) it really put me off ever wanting to buy new their hardware fresh. Just seems to have way too many problems.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/cm9dt9/cex_bou...
They clearly understand that phones are now our digital lifelines, not a place to be playing around with weird features.
Apple doesn’t sell a slow phone, even for $399. People complain about Apple’s high prices but the real “secret” is that Apple’s previous generation phones that they continue to sell new are an excellent value.
Their manufacturing is basically perfect. Since the 8/X especially I haven’t heard of any persistent hardware flaw and even before then there was not much to write home about.
You don’t have to wonder when the next iPhone will come out or what it will be like.
iOS never changes based on what phone you have besides minor necessary differences between notch and non-notch phones. I once had to ship my my phone to be repaired, and I was able to restore my exact setup and all data to my backup iPhone 6S. Not only did it work flawlessly, the 6S was still surprisingly fast.
Overall, you really can’t get a phone that lasts longer. Even iPhones that don’t get iOS 14 are still getting security patches. You could feel pretty decently about connecting an iPhone 5S with iOS 12 to a network. Yep, an 8 year old phone - I am positive there are tens of thousands of people still daily driving that phone.
The Nexus 5X was great, until it bricked itself. Fortunately, freezing it (literally in a freezer) would get it running long enough to get a few critical bits off.
Pixel 2 was a great phone, no complaints. Only replaced it because the battery life was getting painfully low. And the charging connection got really finicky in the last 6 months or so.
Pixel 4a is also great. Only issue is that for some reason, like a quarter of my contacts names don't show up in the text messenger conversation list. Weird, but I can live with it.
Like "Oh I absolutely loved my new car, ran like a dream. Of course there was that one time it spontaneously set on fire on while I was driving it but other than that, it was excellent."
On the other hand, pretty much every Samsung and Apple phone I've owned has been perfect hardware-wise.
[1] https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-raises-the-bar-for-m...
Makes you think less of trying to buy expensive ones when they get obsoleted real fast.
On an unrelated note, my Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 both failed in different ways, but the Nexus S, from the year before the 4, still hasn't.
I have a pixel 2 now. it's good enough for everything I use it for, but it really didn't justify its launch price. it's basically a nexus phone with a fancy chassis and nicer camera. just like my two nexus phones, the volume up button stopped working within a month or two of ownership. it still feels snappy and gets updates, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.
I have a pixel 3a. The "a" series seems to be the same thing, but also at nexus prices.
I remember the Ars Technica review of the 3a saying something like "there were some worries that sales of the 3a might cannibalize sales from the flagship line, to which we can only say... yeah."
Wife and I also have pixel 2's, and AFAIK October 2020 was the last month we got updates[1] :(.
(although it notes "Pixel 2 Preferred Care customers have telephone support until April 2021.")
Which makes this article all the more disappointing, as we're looking to upgrade for this and the usual reasons :).
No dice; I was never able to get the Pixel's USB port to do anything other than draw power from my computer. Apparently this wasn't even an unusual problem.
I didn't mention that my 5X flash died (after 18 months of ownership). Or at least I assume it was the flash...since the bootloader failed screen would loop.
That prompted me to buy pixel 1. My pixel 1 became non-functional because dust got in the microphone...and no replacement parts were available. So I got a moto g7 as an interim.
The pixel 3 is my wife's.
The pixel 4 is my current and replaced moto g7 because it's slow as molasses with newer android.
So basically all my replacements were because of a HW failure or SW slowdown.
This compares to my mom's iPhone 6s that still runs snappy. My brother had a 6 that worked fine until he replaced it for the SE recently.
My kids have used our ipads as skateboards across the tile and they still work fine. I drop them regularly... No problem.
My experience with Google HW is that it is sub par.
LG would fix it for free if you were lucky, they did for me. I think you had a 50/50 chance of them refusing to fix it for free by claiming the failure was due to water damage, even if that was definitely not true. The prevalence of the failure makes me think that every single 5x failed eventually. The timing of the boot-loop failure was such that your alternate Google options were probably Pixel 1 or 2 at the time.
After the 5x failure, I purchased a Pixel 2. It is very fast to this day, but the lack of a microphone jack has been a real thorn to me. My car does not support the bluetooth a2dp profile, I use the USB-C adapter to stream music, and it has put a lot of extra wear on the USB-C connector. It has lasted a long time, and everything else works fine, but it's only a matter of time before I can no longer charge it.
that being said, i do have weird issues where the phone reboots when doing video-intensive tasks (recording video, on a vid call)
for apple, iPhone is literally half their income; i think the phone business is a few percentage points for google. not a surprise that you see more attention to detail w/ apple
I'd consider another Google phone, but I just don't trust them to have designed and implemented a phone that's going to last as long as a phone of that price should last. From the latest round of phones though, motorola seems good enough, except the vibration is very hard to miss unless it's on a table; nokia has bluetooth problems with one of my cars and isn't pushing a fix worldwide, even though some countries have had the fix for months; ugh.
Dangerous games you are playing when you give into Apple.
Not really any reason in switching to iPhones on the weakness of the Pixel line, unless you're trying to make some other political point.
Im going back to iPhone. There are too many problems w/Google HW.
The supply chain sucks if something breaks (which happens much more often than my iDevices). My pixel 1 mic stopped working, and it was impossible to find parts to fix it (including for 3rd part repair stores).
My wife's Pixel 3 won't reliably charge wirelessly. You have to reboot the phone 1x per week inorder to get wireless charging to work. So you put it down... And wake up to a dead phone.
My pixel 4 had a terrible Chrome problem until very recently. Chrome would basically lock up the system. The gesture navigation also kind os sucks.
Also, the pixel 4 glass really sucks. I had scratches all over it with the first month... Vs my Moto G7 which has none.
Don't even get me started on the new Android TV chrome cast or the 2 WearOS watches or my chromebox that can't have more than 2 BT devices connected (or it stops working).