Saying Goodbye to the Original Pixel XL (Premium)

Over the weekend, I prepped my original Pixel XL for shipment back to Google and what I hope is a $400 credit towards my new Pixel 2 XL. It’s time to say goodbye.

As you may know, I had a rough year with the Pixel XL, which I ordered as soon as Google announced the device back in October 2016. My first impressions were that Google was clearly copying the design of the iPhone, the camera was excellent, and that it was too expensive. A day later, I observed that the display seemed a bit smallish, and that I should have ordered a version with more than 32 GB of storage.

In my review a month later, I expressed my disappointment in Google’s direction: Here was a phone that was much more expensive than its predecessor but didn’t offer any meaningful advantages. It also fell short of the iPhone models whose design Google was copying.

Six months into my year with the Pixel XL, I wrote a follow-up. The price and derivative design continued to be negatives, and I was able to add performance creep to that list. (It’s never gone away.) The camera, of course, is amazing, and I like its clean Android image and Project Fi compatibility. Interestingly, those three “pros” have very much guided me in my search for a new phone this past fall.

When I ordered my second Pixel 2 XL from Google—you may recall that my initial order, for a black and white model, wouldn’t have arrived until mid-November—I specified that I wanted to trade-in my original Pixel XL, and was told I should be getting a $400 credit, which seems fair.

I had purchased that first Pixel XL using Google Store Financing. Whatever you think of the price of these things, this option is more than fair: The payments are based on a 24-month loan, and there’s no interest charged on phone purchases. I paid off the Pixel XL sometime earlier this year—I don’t recall when exactly—so I didn’t owe anything.

But I did use Google Store Financing again because a) I don’t have $1000 burning a hole in my pocket, and b) I would be getting some form of credit by returning my first Pixel XL. Assuming I do get that $400 credit, that means I’ll owe about $625 all told. And I do have that much in my PayPal account, so I will pay it off immediately.

The suspiciously small return envelope arrived for the original Pixel sometime this past weekend, but it lacks enough padding, so I’ll probably wrap up the device a bit better to be safe. But before I could do that, I needed to prep the phone for its goodbye.

That means a few things. There’s content on there I needed to get off. And because I had been running beta versions of Android on the device—currently version 8.1—I decided to flash it back to the latest stock image, which is for Android 8.0. That last bit was probably unnecessary. But. You know.

As you may know, I back up my phone-based photos to both Google Play Photos and OneDrive, and I recommend that you do the same. But every time I wipe out a phone, I manually copy all of its photos to my PC and then copy them from there to the NAS. This is simple enough: Just connect the phone via USB, pull down the notification shade and change “USB charging this device” to “Transfer files,” and then use File Manager in Windows to copy from the phone’s DCIM folder to the PC. I last did this two months ago, so I had about 1100 photos taking up about 3.84 GB of space.

I don’t ever restore a new phone from an old phone backup, so I also took the time to examine my text messages to see whether there was anything I needed to save. I’m not aware of a text messaging backup service per se, and unlike some, I’m actually OK with wiping this stuff out, but I did find a few things to save manually, like the phone numbers for the local electricians and others that aren’t in my contacts list.

The most complicated bit, of course, was paving over the device and returning it to a stock Android 8.0 image. This is a complex process involving command line tools on the PC, and I’m nervous about documenting it fully, because I would hate for anyone to follow my directions and then brick their phone. (Which is absolutely possible.) But I have done this many times, and always successfully.

The instructions for the Pixel and other Google devices are mostly available on the Google Developers website. But they leave out a crucial first step: Before you can follow the instructions under “To flash a system image,” you need to do a few other things first.

That is, you must enable Developer Options on the device by navigating to Settings> About phone and tapping the Build number entry seven times. (Yes, like a magic incantation.) And then you must navigate to Settings> Developer options and enable two options: USB Debugging and OEM unlocking. Then, you can follow Google’s instructions.

Anyway, I downloaded the latest (November 2017) image for the Pixel XL and followed the instructions, and now the device is at the first Setup screen waiting to be used by someone else for the first time. Once I removed the case and popped out the SIM, it was good to go.

And away it shall go.