Day: December 1, 2024

I can tell because of the pixels

Our phones were 5 years old, battery life wasn’t looking too hot anymore, my spouse needed a new phone wallet anyway, and I was thinking… if the Orange Menace manages to slap arbitrary tariffs onto stuff phones could get a LOT more expensive a few months from now. And it was Black Friday.

So we got new phones. After a little review reading I chose Google Pixel 8a — not the newest, not the shiniest, but almost half the (discounted) price of the latest shiny things from Samsung, and reportedly outperforms its own price range. And not so AI-centric. And a similar size to what we had, though of course not identical because it would be a real shame if any phone case managed to work for more than one model and version of phone 😛

Setting up a new phone is a pain in the ass. You can tell they tried to make it better, with the ability to automatically transfer apps and data wirelessly from your old phone. And activating new unlocked phones on Credo Mobile wasn’t too hard, it’s just that… they tell you to call customer service, which means waiting on hold for a fair amount of time, confirming a lot of information, and then they tell you all you need to do is move the SIM card. So mostly, it’s poking the “retry” button several times while your phone gives you a vague error message, because you’re not getting a good enough cell signal, and waiting through several different progress bars.

All the preferences stuff, though. Between a 5-year-old Samsung with an older Android version, and Google’s official phone with the it-was-current-six-weeks-ago Android version, there are lot of little, annoying interface tweaks. These are the ones that bug me the most:

  • The top row of the main page on the home screen/launcher always shows the date. You can’t turn that off anywhere (you can turn off the weather info line). You can’t use that space for widgets, it’s just dedicated to telling you what day it is. I preferred my old weather widget, but it’s basically been made forcibly redundant.
  • At the bottom of EVERY page on the launcher, there’s a Google search bar that cannot be hidden. This is not the primary way I want to use my phone or search, guys. It’s wasted space.
  • The 4×4 Media Monkey widget actually takes 4×5 spaces for some reason. Combine that with the search bar and you just can’t fit anything else on a page. On my old phone, I could use that widget and two rows of icons…
  • Some of the customization that I liked on my old phone turned out to be Samsung-specific. I had a particular always-on screen setting I liked. I want my wallpaper to center on the screen and sit still when I change pages, not fit to some virtual space wider than the screen and then scroll, so things aren’t centered anymore.
  • Maybe this is a Pixel-specific thing, but for some reason, the default action of the power button was to bring up Google Assistant. Yuck. It can be changed but it shouldn’t have had to be changed.
  • This is definitely specific to the Pixel, but the volume buttons are about halfway down the side (instead of closer to the top as they have been on every other phone I’ve had). The wireless phone charger in my car clamps down on the Volume Down button. I have a new charger on the way but until it arrives, I’m going to “fix” it with a Lego brick. (Giving “bricking one’s phone” a whole new meaning…)

OK, other than that… the screen is nice, the sound is better than on the old phone, and it seems generally zippy (it boots much more quickly than my old phone and some apps seem to load faster). Its battery life also seems to be far less troubled by the coloring book app I like to fidget with.

I may look into alternate launchers. I installed Nova, then changed my mind. The main irritation to me is that wasted space, but I have set up a layout that works okayish.

I lost QuickPic because it was pulled off the app store years ago. Simple Gallery replaces it just fine.

Media Monkey just did not want to deal properly with album art, and combined with the messed-up widget and some generally fiddly stuff about it, I decided to look at alternatives. Musicolet, which is completely free, is what I’ve got on there right now. It seems to mostly be straightforward, and aside from a couple of minor quirks, pretty configurable. The navigation might be a bit of an adjustment but it might be what I stick with.