Since my Lumia 950 is starting to act up, and Windows Phone basically has no future, I broke down and ordered a Pixel 2. Here are my first impressions after using it for an evening. Any suggestions are welcome!
– I’m using the Microsoft Launcher which is pretty nice I guess? I didn’t spend any time with the stock launcher so I don’t really have a good basis for comparison.
– No wireless charging 😦 Of course, this is paired with…
– Amazing battery life! The main reason I switched was because my Lumia 950 got comically bad battery life (like down to 80% by the time I got to work), and so I had to keep it on the wireless charging stand all day. (and this Lumia 950 was a replacement for the last Lumia 950 I had where this started happening and then eventually the phone would sporadically refuse to turn on because it didn’t detect a battery) We’ll see how the Pixel 2 holds up after more than a day, but I’m hopeful!
– No dedicated camera button, although you can double-tap the power button to launch the camera which is nice.
– I miss live tiles! Widgets are OK (although it’s very not-discoverable how to add them to the launcher), but they’re so big and non-standard.
– Having LastPass be able to sit in the notifications bar and fill in username/passwords in websites and apps is really handy, even though it is a bit buggy.
– The calendar situation is not good. I have two calendars that I care about – my personal Google one and my work Outlook one. On Windows Phone the Calendar app just merged them together, which was great! On Android the Google Calendar app doesn’t show my Outlook calendar and vice versa. The Outlook widget _does_ show Google Calendar entries, but that only shows the next 7 days.
– I don’t know how secure the fingerprint unlock is, but it’s very convenient and fast. (although maybe half the time it takes two tries, but it’s still darn quick!)
– The whole permissions situation is pretty good now that you can easily revoke permissions from apps. (why does the Washington Post app want access to my contacts? Denied!)
– I’m kind of particular on what I want for my work email. I definitely don’t want it to show up in notifications because I don’t want to be “forced” to see it outside of work, but I like being able to glance at it if I’m bored. On Windows Phone I could do this by having a live tile for it – the number of new emails would show up on the tile, and I could turn off notifications. As far as I can tell, if I want a number of emails on the app icon on Android it has to show up in notifications as well. Maybe I’ll like having no work email notification better…
– The Outlook app supports swiping emails one way to delete and the other to archive – why doesn’t the Gmail app??
– The Gmail app shows me the number of unread emails on it, which is very annoying as I often will leave emails unread until I get home and deal with them. (the correct behavior is to show you the number new emails since you last opened the app, in case anyone’s wondering 🙂 )
– It sure is nice having official apps for everything in the world that get regularly updated!
– But no builtin Podcast app? Did I miss it somewhere?
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