In my personal technology life, I do move pretty fucking fast. Once I’ve decided that I like one thing better than another then I’m mere seconds away from huge piles of administrivia and credit card debt. It’s just how I function which is arguably broken as hell. Just ask my credit cards. They’re very much aware of the problem.
After deciding that I wanted back into the Pixel game now that the Pixel 4 is kind of a dead issue and most of the design decisions that I found untenable for my own use have gone the way of the dinosaur, I hit the preorder button with no regrets. It arrived last night and, as I mentioned previously, there’s no time to start messing with an electronic device that is central to both your life and how you make a living than right after that device arrived.
I started the whole process by porting my phone number from Sprint to Mint Mobile. I did have to attempt this a couple of times and actually talk to someone at Sprint in order to get the account PIN that I actually knew and had written down to work for the porting process. Unlike my Comcast cancellation when I moved out of my post-divorce apartment, at no point did I lie and say that I was moving to Antarctica. The whole porting process only took about 15 minutes from when I hit the Submit button until I had phone service again which was smoother than I expected. My previous service was Spent-Mobile so I’m essentially using the same towers as I was a few minutes ago. Easy.
I transferred data from my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G over to the Pixel with no hiccups so other than a couple of political spam messages that came in while this was in progress nothing was lost. After the super tall OnePlus screen for the past year or so the Pixel 5 felt absurdly tiny. I have pretty small hands so it was novel to be able to reach all sides of the screen one handed. Despite being well accustomed to the 90 Hz illusion of everything on your phone being alarmingly fast the Pixel 5 feels impressively snappy despite the cheaper chipset. I think the compromises that Google made towards things people actually wanted like more RAM and a larger battery were the best design decisions they’ve made recently. The Soli chip included with the Pixel 4 probably seemed like a cool bleeding edge thing to include in their phone until it failed to do anything useful and truncated battery life. There are none of the surprises that I didn’t want and all of the things that I loved about my Pixel 3 XL (excepting the screen size) like the fingerprint reader and that fucking camera.
I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a phone with a great camera until I took my first experimental Night Sight photo of the view from my front porch. I live in a newly built out part of suburban Denver and the other side of the street is the beginning of a wildlife preserve so there is very little ambient light outside. I think the nearest operational street light is at least a block away and this is what came out the other side:
which was pretty satisfying since it was taken at nearly midnight with no actual source of light other than a windows behind me. When you want to actually take memorable photos but can’t be bothered with messing with anything beyond a confirmation that you’d like to use Night Sight then the Pixel is the phone for you. The sensor is pretty much the same as the one included in my older Pixel phone and the photo above is the result of extending my arm, clicking the photo button, and not doing a good job of keeping my hand still. That is what I expect out of my camera which probably accounts for how badly I felt about most of the photos I took on my OnePlus. The magical idiot-proofing just isn’t there.
The other important part for me was the increased battery capacity and the Pixel has more than delivered on that front. After the initial charge up from out of the box, I’ve been running from that initial charge since then and just recently hit the 30% mark. That’s pretty stellar given the amount of time I spend monkeying around with settings and twitchily tweaking settings. I tend to at least passively charge my phone whenever I’m sitting in one place for more than 30 minutes and after resisting the urge to do that for the sake of science I’m pretty confident that I could get away with charging this phone every other day if I needed to. That is a tremendous improvement upon what I saw with my Pixel 3 XL. It would hit the 20% mark near the end of the day without any topping up charge which always made me a little uncomfortable. I’m fond of being able to forget to plug in my phone before going to bed and still having some life left in it the next morning. I will miss the OnePlus warp charging that would erase some of those mistakes but I’d still prefer to just have the capacity to begin with rather than just pumping a ridiculous amount of watts into the battery to stave off the empties.
My first 24 hours with the Pixel 5 have been great and I’m actually excited to be completely happy with a middle of the road phone specifications-wise. I’m glad that there are at least a few companies acknowledging that just spec-bumping once a year doesn’t make a compelling argument for switching phones.