Google seems incapable of shipping reliable handsets. And I'm tired of being victimized by this.
Yes, I'm returning my Pixel 3 XL.
And seriously. WTF.
I spend a lot of time---too much time, many would say---over-thinking things. One level, I can at least argue that I do this for you: Readers and podcast listeners can hopefully learn from my experiences, from my mistakes, and from my misfortune. And they can hopefully use this feedback to make good decisions for themselves.
But I'm no Jerry Pournelle, he who once famously observed that he "makes mistakes so you don't have to." I just make mistakes. And then I'm honest about it. Same impact, I guess. But I don't deliberately poke bears for the most part. I just stumble into caves and then wonder what went wrong.
Consider my recent examinations of Gmail alternatives. In the wake of my most recent check-in, I heard from Exchange expert Tony Redmond, who noted that I was over-complicating email. "It's really not that difficult," he told me.
Normally, I would agree with that. But my observations in that most recent email experiment post was that thanks to multiple levels of spam filtering and consolidating multiple email accounts into a single location had triggered numerous lost emails. What this highlighted, to me, was a flaw that is central to my way of doing things. Which is that I often spend the time to figure out the best way to do something complex---and consolidating email accounts absolutely is complex, given the different ways you can do this---and then I forget about it and move on to other things. In other words, I did the work to make this less complicated. And then was bit by the fact that I wasn't paying attention anymore. My post wasn't about making something simple overly complex. It was about paying attention, about revisiting things you've settled on over time to be sure your assumptions/expectations are still true.
So yeah, I can beat things to death.
I spend even more time struggling to figure out which smartphone I should use. Last year, as you may recall, I switched to Android. That sounds like a simple enough task, given the fact that I'd long used iPhones and Android handsets side-by-side. But the move to Android was a bit more complex than just picking up a different phone. I switched my primary phone number, which I had obtained in 2007 when I switched from Verizon to AT&T to get the first iPhone, to Google's Project Fi. So I was changing carriers as well. And Project Fi was a bit of an unknown (at least as my sole/primary cell service).
The Project Fi transition has been an overwhelming success story, and that's something I want to be sure to highlight before I go down the horrible rabbit hole of my latest problems with Google's phones. The service is wonderful. It's affordable. It's transparent. And it works seamlessly when I travel internationally, a feature I treasure. (I try to spend at least 4 weeks outside the United States every ...
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.