A Few Thoughts on My Temporary Return to the Pixel (Premium)

My trip to Mexico City this past week has given me an opportunity to re-test the Google Pixel 6 Pro after two months with the iPhone 13 Pro.

I have, perhaps, written too much about this. But rather than run-down all my navel-gazing with regards to the iPhone vs. Pixel debate, let me just highlight the two big ones that came up recently.

Just ahead of my most recent trip, I wrote about how curiously useless the iPhone is when it comes to blocking spam call and texts in Where the iPhone Falls Short. Given Apple’s pro-customer/pro-privacy stance, I’d assumed they would nail this, but they don’t. And given my years of experience with virtually every Pixel ever made, I was sure if I switched my Mint Mobile SIM back to the Pixel 6 Pro, that the mountains of spam calls (and to a lesser degree, texts) would disappear.

This was actually good timing because we were heading to Mexico and I wanted to see how the Pixel’s dual SIM experience measured up to that of the iPhone. This is an area where Apple does a great job, overall, as noted in More Mobile: Getting Started with Dual SIMs. I feel like I must have used dual SIMs with a Pixel at some point, but I couldn’t recall. So comparing these things back to back seemed like a good opportunity to compare them.

And so I configured my Pixel to use the Mint Mobile SIM in its SIM tray and Google Fi---which gives me terrific international data coverage---in the eSIM. And off we went.

Here’s what I discovered.

As expected, the spams silently disappeared as soon as I switched to the Pixel. Say what you will about Google---I mean, I will---but the 8 to 15 spam calls that the iPhone blissfully let through to annoy me and force me to deal with each manually stopped immediately. Every once in a while, I’ll see a quick pop-up on the Pixel lock screen, which serves only to show me that it’s handling things, but I usually don’t even see that. It just works. There is nothing for me to do. I love that.

With regards to dual SIMs, the experience is very similar between the two platforms. The only difference is that the iPhone lets you enable the data connection on both SIMs simultaneously, whereas Android, more traditionally, alerts you that the other data connection will be disabled if you choose a different SIM. There is no circumstance where I’d need my Mint Mobile data connection in Mexico, since it won’t work here anyway. So I leave the Google Fi data connection on and I can access phone calls and texts from both accounts, side-by-side. It’s what I’m looking for.

This isn’t anyone’s fault but mine, but once I issued I have had with my Mint Mobile account here---and, embarrassing, this has come up on the past few international trips too, is that the phone (iPhone or Pixel) wouldn’t download text messages, and each time I tried to send one from Mint, it would fail. I was positive, over time, that this was a configuration issue somewhere---the APN, perhaps, or ...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC