Premium or not? The decision is yours!
Pixel is a phone made by Google that promises a lot. It’s a smartphone with high specs, including a display of 5.0 inches with FHD AMOLED at 441ppi and 2.5D Corning® Gorilla® Glass 4, a 2,770 mAh battery, a USB Type-C port, an outstanding Aerospace-grade aluminum unibody with Pixel Imprint (Back-mounted fingerprint sensor for fast unlocking), 32 or 128GB of internal storage, Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 821 2.15Ghz + 1.6Ghz (64Bit Quad-Core), a 12.3MP rear camera with f/2.0 Aperture and an 8MP front camera with f/2.4 Aperture. It comes in two versions: Pixel and Pixel XL. The whole design is doubtless iPhone-like. There are much more included inside this premium little miracle, but it’s the first phone that Google made, trying to beat her competitors and as a result, it seems to be really buggy. Where to start?
MAJOR DISTORTION IN AUDIO
The problem was widespread to the community when the Reddit user Mark “badmark” Buckman posted a note with a video explaining that both Pixel and Pixel XL suffered from distorted audio when the volume is turned up to the highest level. There are also users complaining about several audio problems like audio popping and clicking issues, after connecting their Pixel Phone to external speakers.
OVERHEATING
Why can’t any company out there invest in technologies that can avoid overheating in portable devices? Overheating is really ridiculous to exist, when you convinced everyone that you have launched something portable and premium with all those high specs. Lots of users are complaining about overheating on even simple daily tasks. Also, an expert reviewer reported that it was overheated when she used Snapchat on Pixel for approximately 30 minutes. Come on guys, come on…
LENS FLARE
Some users reported the lens flare issue also known as the “Halo Effect”. As I mentioned above, camera’s specs are high but considering those reports we should wonder if Google’s choice of glass was appropriate for this phone. After this issue was published, a Pixel team staffer responded to those concerns that the crew is working on a software fix through HDR+ to mathematically spot these flares and “subtract it from the image”. But is this a clear fix? I don’t think so!
SOFTWARE FREEZING
Camera and software freezing is one of the most annoying problems for many out there. As several owners posted to Google’s Products Forum, the phone keeps freezing and gets unresponsive randomly. Some of them suggested to uninstall the Life360 third-party app. However, others are convinced that the problem doesn’t appear to be a specific app.
CONNECTIVITY ISSUES
Since the first month that Pixel was released, many reports were posted about LTE and Bluetooth connectivity issues. LTE connectivity issues are focused on the LTE band 4 frequency and Bluetooth can’t always be successfully paired with another Bluetooth device. It seems that the LTE connectivity issues were fixed, after Google released the Android 7.1.1 Nougat update for Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, but the Bluetooth pairing problems are still existing.