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My brief encounter with Google Pixel 8 Pro
Quoting: My brief encounter with Google Pixel 8 Pro —
The Google Pixel 8 Pro is a strange beast. It's got decent hardware, but the expression of its abilities isn't perfect. Android 16 is annoying. The display and the audio are average. The big bonus of owning this device is the promise of quick updates from the vendor, and for many many years. If you care about security, this is a major plus. And then, there's the camera, which is simply awesome.
But then, if you look at the cost of the contemporary Pixel Pro, whatever its number, 'tis an expensive device. And for the same budget, you can get yourself a Fairphone and a nice pocket camera with 25-40x optical zoom and photo quality that beats any smartphone many times over. Sure, the smartphone offers many other capabilities, but it's not like you get orders of magnitude more. And from what I see, the results are nothing like I expected when I began my device replacement journey a few years ago. Back then, the contenders were Samsung, Apple, and Google, with Fairphone as a strange fourth musketeer. None of these met my expectations quite as I wanted. Each surprised me in some way, for better or worse.
The Pixel 8 Pro is a camera phone first and foremost. In this regard, I only have stellar praise. But the ecosystem is toyish, noisy, and I don't like the trend. For some reason, I thought the hardware and software integration would be sci-fi good, but it's not. It's the Wild West of Android, which I should have known. My fault for being an eternal optimist, me.
The end result is dire. There simply isn't a phone that gives me what I need. The iPhone is too restrictive, the Samsung too kitschy, the Pixel somewhat crude, and the Fairphone plain. If one must suffer, which seems to be the case for me, then I guess Fairphone is the cheapest suffering, without dramatic loss of functionality if any. So I might as well have a mid-range phone and cry a little, rather than have a high-end phone and cry a lot. This also means I might have to test a non-Android setup, either GrapheneOS or /e/OS, because the current state of affairs is silly. Monty Python level of silly.