I currently own a pixel 2 XL. At this point it is a 5-year-old design. It still gets pretty good reviews on the internals even for being so old. Apparently some of the progress has kind of slowed down. Processor improvements and even camera improvements are minimal. It took excellent pictures 5 years ago and it still takes excellent pictures today. Having said that the pixel 3 and pixel 4 are starting to come down in price quite a bit. So let's talk about that.
The pixel 3 has some improvements but nothing major. The big thing that everybody points out between the pixel 3 and the pixel 2 is the screen. The pixel 2 screen is somewhat faded looking compared to the typical phone. It's still very sharp the colors are still in color and it works just fine, but really it doesn't look like something that used to cost $950. Still that's what they sold it for. So that alone really doesn't make it worth upgrading to pixel 3. The pixel 3 screen is slightly bigger but the processor is basically the same the memory is exactly the same. There's just not much different about it.
If the pixel 4 were to drop in price like the pixel 2 did to about $200. Then it would be an easy choice to buy the thing. The screen is better and bigger it's got a faster processor. It has near field charging. The refresh rate is faster which I really don't care about. And interestingly it has a significant camera enhancement which I would like, a standalone telephoto camera. I think there's some other small improvements to it, but the better screen and better camera would make it a good deal.
Unfortunately there is one bump in the road for the pixel 4, they switched to face unlock only, rather than fingerprint. So you either have to do a manual unlock or you have to use face unlock. And it uses some fancy infrared thing of some sort which is supposedly super cool but I still don't want it. So with the pixel 4 realistically I would end up using the face unlock, wishing that I would take the time to just use the manual unlock. Technology really plays on your lazy Gene.
The pixel 4 does not have a 3.5 mm Jack and an SD card slot. Which is really a shame because it would make the phone work well for five or more years. It would easily be worth putting a new battery in it when the battery dies. But you have to keep offloading stuff if you want to use a smaller 128 GB memory phone that Google produces.
On these pixels the videos take up a ton of memory. A 10 minute video takes up about 1 GB of memory. So granted I'm not taking videos all day long, the photos take less than 5 MB on average, but unless you do very short videos it's going to eat up 128 GB. So you have to offload this stuff onto some sort of DVD or USB drive. Not the end of the world, but just not convenient.
In summary, if the pixel 3 dropped to under $100 I'd probably buy it just to see what it was like. If the pixel 4 drops to about $200 I will buy it and use it for the foreseeable future. My ideal phone would be a Samsung of some sort, but they are relatively expensive and they don't come down in price the way pixels do.
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