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 roaming settings—but I would Google it, never figure it out, etc.

On this trip, I had had enough. I was going to figure this out and/or just kill my Mint Mobile account, which coincidentally is due for renewal at the end of this month. And so I Google the problem again, came across the usual results which claim it has something to do with blocking people when, in my case, it very much does not. And then I finally landed on the answer. This is embarrassing because I knew this was the answer at one point and just forgot. But it goes like this: Mint Mobile, as noted, doesn’t let you access your data allotment internationally like most carriers. But it does let you make/receive calls and texts … but only if you pay for it. The carrier offers an “INTL roaming credit” feature where you put $5, $10, or $20 on the account, and that pays for it. I put in $10, and everything just worked. And I still have a credit of $9.38 as I write this, despite all the annoying texts we’ve received this week from our neighbors in PA. (Who, I swear to God, dramatically increase the volume of their messages every time we’re outside the country.)

(Mint also offers Wi-Fi Calling & Texts, which would normally be fine, too. But that’s never worked for me, for some reason.)

OK, that has nothing to do with the whole iPhone vs. Pixel debate, I know, but in the theme of you learning from my mistakes, I hope it’s instructive. Let me move on to my experiences using the Pixel again in light of my iPhone 13 Pro experiences.

I’ve not used the iPhone even once on this trip, I’ve just stuck with the Pixel. (My iPhone does have a Google Fi data SIM in it just in case, but it’s stayed off.)

Day-to-day, the Pixel is bigger and bulkier, and I hate its curved display edges. Hate them. This is subjective, like everything else, and I’m sure there are people who liked curved displays, but a pox on that: Objectively, curved display edges and inferior to and less reliable than flat displays, and I really hope the Pixel 7 Pro makes that shift. I have a low-profile case on the thing, and it mimics the Pixel’s curved design and is as slippery as a bar of soap. I need to figure that out when I get home.

The Pixel is big, but so am I, and have no issues accessing it from a front jeans or shirt pocket. And there are things to like about its relatively huge display. It’s much easier to read, of course, and this is useful when my wife is looking over my shoulder because we’re trying to find a restaurant or whatever in Google Maps.

The fingerprint reader, despite at least two updates, remains unreliable. At least twice on this trip, it’s  actually failed enough on one pass that the phone forced me to type in my PIN, and I make a point of commenting to my wife, “and people keep telling me this thing works fine.” She couldn’t care less, I’m just a burden like that. But when it does work, it’s appreciated because we are wearing masks all the time in Mexico.

Here’s one weirdism I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone comment on. Walking around Mexico City, or any other place you are visiting and want to take photos, it’s very common (for me, anyone) to leave the phone unlocked and on the camera app. That way, when you see something interesting, you just raise the phone up and take a shot. We’ve all done this, I assume.

This works normally with the iPhone. Why wouldn’t it? But as I walk around with the Pixel in my hand but down by the side of my leg, I will constantly feel it vibrating some haptic warning. And so when I lift up the phone to take a shot, I can’t: what the Pixel is doing—and given the accelerometers in this thing, consider how dumb this is—is using Google Lens to scan the environment I’m walking by. And when it sees some text on a sign or some other recognizable item, Google Lens pops up over the camera app. And that’s what I see when I raise the phone. Not the camera app, ready to take a photo. But Google Lens, which I need to dismiss.

This is endlessly frustrating. I do use Google Lens for things like scanning restaurant menu QR codes and the like, but I do not want it coming up on its own. I’ve searched for a fix, but have failed. If you happen to know about this one, please let me know.

Battery life, overall, is not as good as with the iPhone, and that’s as true normally as it is with dual-SIMs. I don’t have any way to measure this accurately, but dual-SIMs seem to suck up more juice, as does using Google Maps and taking lots of photos. I’ve gotten through most days, but only because we’re not out for the entire day. And its slower charging is frustrating. I’d love to be able to configure that.

The Pixel 6 Pro camera is spectacular overall. Its optical zoom capabilities don’t rival those of the latest Samsung flagships, but it’s better than the iPhone in this regard. Day photos, of course, are excellent. And night photos, curiously, are a mixed bag. I’ve taken some great night shots, but it seems to struggle with bright lights in an otherwise dark scene—a streetlight on a dark road, for example—and I feel like the iPhone would be better in some instances. I’m not really here to test the phones side-by-side, so this is sort of a general observation, I guess. The Pixel is my favorite overall smartphone camera.

I’ve often mentioned that I really like the minimalist (not stock) Android image that Google uses on its Pixels. And that Pixel/Android offers far more customizations than does iPhone. And those are mostly true. But it is bizarre to me that you can’t take advantage of the full height of the Pixel display on the home page because Google doesn’t allow you to remove the “At a Glance” widget at the top or the Google Search bar at the bottom. That means that, on the Pixel 6 Pro, there are three (!) icon rows you can’t even access, you know, for icons. (On my current layout.) I can configure five rows of icons, not eight. That’s ridiculous.

To counter this, I’ve had to do something I very much don’t want to do, and replace the Pixel launcher with a third-party alternative. I chose the Nova launcher because it’s pretty close to the Pixel launcher, but it lets me use every single icon row on the home page, and get rid of At a Glance (which I did) and the search bar (which I ended up keeping, albeit a less busy version).

One downside: I can’t access the Google Discovery field by swiping right on the home screen, as I can with the Pixel launcher, and I’d prefer that. There is a complicated set of steps you can undertake to make it work, but I can’t be bothered, and so I just access this feature via the Google app, as I do on the iPhone.

I’ve written about some specific app differences between iPhone and Android, and there’s not much point in going through all that again. But I will cite two apps I use all the time that are much better on the iPhone than on Android: Audible and Fitbit. With Audible, I can cast to Sonos speakers directly from the app, which I prefer, but on Android, I have to use the tedious Sonos app, which requires digging into a ridiculous menu under Audible to find content. And with Fitbit, the Android version doesn’t ever show me my complete data sets for things like exercise or sleep, but it’s always accurate on iPhone. Maddening.

From a piece of mind perspective. I like that iOS offers mobile app tracking protection that is pissing off companies like Facebook. But there’s nothing like this in Android, and there never will be, because Google’s empire is built on tracking users and selling that data to advertisers. So I’m using the DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection functionality to provide a similar service on the Pixel. Does it even work? Honestly, I have no idea: there’s a little key icon in the status bar and I don’t believe it’s broken anything. But who can say?

Overall, I’m mostly OK with how the Pixel has performed on this trip. I may just do what I did in the past and use one phone (in this case the iPhone) around home and then the Pixel when I travel. We’ll see. But the first thing I need to resolve is my Mint Mobile account: now that we’re traveling internationally again, and will likely be doing so more often if this apartment purchase goes through, it will probably make more sense to just use Google Fi again going forward. (Or maybe I switch to a cheaper Mint Mobile plan, we’ll see.) But that’s a job for later, after I return home from Mexico.