It's strange irony that I happened on this link after searching around for a replacement for my 5X, and heading back to HackerNews for a little break.
The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery, which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.
I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it. I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7 has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top bulletpoint.
What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries, keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the hardware vendors.
> The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint
As a tech professional who can afford to be a little fiscally irresponsible once in a while... the Pixel has been by far the best phone I've ever owned.
This is the first Android phone I feel has really challenged Apple's obsessively airtight design. I have never noticed a stutter, the camera is absurdly fast and shoots great photos, and the battery lasts nearly twice as long as my 5X.
Google has historically provided the cheaper, higher-barrier phones, but they're attempting to catch up while users are becoming lukewarm on Apple. I think they nailed it.
> The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use.
I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.
> What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety.
We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).
But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.
If you are looking for a hackable device with long support I would recommend Oneplus. I had 1+1 and loved it (but I smashed the screen). If you prefer smaller screen and are a bit adventurous you can try Nextbit Robin. Great design, looks like it has great support and is cheap (<$150 on Amazon).
BTW. I currently have 5X and have no problems with it.
I recently hit the LG G4 bootloop issue. Now that I am looking for a new phone (and looking at the pixel) I am finding defect problems pretty much in every phone out there.
I think I have come to the temporary conclusion that phones will always have problems even after several replacements. So all I can do is shrug, and ask why they cannot make phones like they used to.
There is a bug in the update process that can cause the phone to slow and drain battery like crazy. Doing a reset might clear it up. Its a pain but I did the same thing a couple of times through the various updates and now its behaving as it should for about 6 months.
Do you use Android's encryption feature? The 5X doesn't have a dedicated encryption chip, so all decryption/encryption is done with special (slower) ARM instructions. This really slows down IO.
What about the OnePlus? I'm happy with my iPhone 6S, but I would switch to that if the next iPhone isn't to my taste. A couple of my friends have it, and they seem to love the fast charge ability.
I have seen the same symptom on Samsung devices with degraded batteries. With a new battery it will go all the way to 0% before shutting down. Then as the battery gradually degrades it will shut down with no warning at 5%, 10%, 20%, and so on. But when you get close to that limit the point where it actually shuts down depends heavily on power consumption at the time. It might have been able to keep running fine for a while but as soon as you launch a power intensive app such as the camera it will immediately die.
My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to the battery by shutting down.
Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
I've had the same experience and I came up with the same hypothesis. It started happening just when Pokemon Go was popular, so I had a lot of opportunity to collect data. At first I knew I had to quit the app and turn off GPS when I saw the 25% alert. Then after some time it would shutdown before it showed the 25% alert. Eventually it started dying closer to 50%. Replacing the battery has helped a lot, and with the better capacity I'm getting down to 25% less frequently.
>Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
Assuming you have an extra removable battery charged and on your person at the time, and you still need to shutdown your device to do it.
And assuming you want to either juggle charging multiple batteries in the phone, or you get an external charger.
This isn't just on Pixels, I have a 6P that will turn off early as well, and I'd hazard a guess it has more to do with the latest Android versions than the specific hardware.
I am one of the unfortunate owners of a Nexus 6P whose device was abrutely shutting down at random occasions. The phone would shut down when battery level usually was below 60% and I was out walking. At first I though it had something to do with it being cold outside (I live in Sweden) but later I proved that was not it. Phone itself has not been tampered with (running official Android, 7.1.1 OTA) and is in near mint condition with protective case used.
Anyways, I did what most people do not do and unlocked bootloader, installed TWRP and Pure Nexus Project 7.1.1 ROM and am happy to report that issue is now completely gone (I did stress-test it several times in below zero temperatures) !
My Galaxy Note 4 did the same thing. But this was after about a year of use. And hey, after replacing the battery it works fine again!
And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable battery to avoid these problems.
More generally, this season's phones are also cheap-looking and cheap-feeling. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me, looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).
2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.
I had this on a Moto X after just over 15 months of use. I think it was only a slightly degraded battery lifetime at that point. Likewise, I'm guessing this has something to do with battery measurement as much as anything else.
I've been running 6.0.1 on my 6P for a while now. I hear so many people complaining about battery life after updating. Battery life and reliably is the most important feature to me. I haven't had the 30% battery issue and my battery life is great.
Same here. Originally, it would get to 5% then shut down, but it's gotten progressively worse. The highest I've had it shut down at now is ~20%. My first guess was that it's an issue of battery degradation not being properly accounted for, but the news about (new) Pixels suffering from the same problem makes it seem like that's unlikely. Hopefully this issue is resolved via an update, because I'd feel somewhat guilty recommending the Pixel to people weary of Samsung phones only to have major issues arise.
My Nexus 6 did this quite often, as does my wife's HTC One M8. It definitely could be an Android issue, but I think it would have to be a particularly egregious and obvious mistake.
If it is software, I'd strongly suspect something at kernel level, since quite a few times in my experience, the shutdown is too quick for a safe shutdown. Userspace seems to get a notification that battery is low because it usually gives the "shutting down" alert, but then just shuts off in a suspiciously short amount of time.
I'd be more likely to think it's probably something in the battery/power stack that's not managing or reporting the power well. Discharge/voltage curves are not at all linear, [1] [2], so it's logical that issues with immediately available voltage might start to affect the device around the 30% level. Additionally, as another commenter has mentioned, the discharge curve is dependent upon temperature [3], so a sudden drop in ambient temperature will eventually have a direct effect on the reported voltage.
I'm not exactly sure what kind of metrics are commonly used for reporting battery percentage, but I am about to read a few (okay, maybe half of one) Arxiv papers that came up in a search. [4] Presumably, it's strongly based on some voltage modeling and I can imagine that would have a hard time coping with external factors beyond its measurement capacity, like ambient temperature drops. I don't suppose a user would be happy to see their reported battery percentage drop like a rock immediately upon stepping outside.
I really don't know where I was going with all that, except I guess to say that my gut says Battery "percentage" is a bit more an art than a science. That is to say, there are psychological reasons not to report based on voltage directly (it may go up if you step into a warmer room; "Wat?"), and I can imagine any metric is going to have its strengths and weaknesses, because you really can't account as much for user behavior that changes important physical conditions of the battery.
When my Nexus 6 shuts down at 25%, I can turn it back on, and it still shows 23% after that. And it does seem to be temperature dependent. So I think it has to do with battery monitoring.
Quite likely. My understanding is that battery capacity is measured based on the voltage drops as the mah runs low. Thing is that temperature affects resistance and thus observed voltage (digital thermometer work on this principle, afaik). Could be that Google has set the cutoff a bit high, and momentary chills result in a too early shutdown (possibly to avoid data loss or some such).
Android on Google devices is a joke. I have a new Nexus 7 that sometimes turns on and off correctly and sometimes does not. I see articles on how great the power management is going to be on Android N+1 but I think the people who write them run iOS because if they ran Android they'd be telling google to make the power button work right first.
Honestly, it's starting to feel like Android on a lot of devices is a joke, as far as the hardware experience. I've always been a passionate fan of the OS and anti-walled garden, but the daily frustrations of using my S6, a year old "flagship" phone, kind of makes me question what the advantages really are.
It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.
Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.
I've got a nexus 5x on google fi and while it's fine compared with the cost of my iphone, I've been unimpressed with the UX. Feels a bit clunky and non intuitive in certain areas-- this morning I was trying to get a number from the calls log and ended up redialing inadvertently. I wanted to call from a land line so I hung up abruptly (unfortunately my callee had just picked up). Just little nuisances like that, that has me missing my iphone.
It's an amazing piece of braindead UI that holding down the power button for ~5 seconds on an Android phone triggers a reboot, even on a locked screen. Apparently no one at Google carries items other than a phone in their pockets.
Same thing on my Nexus 7, plus the orientation doesn't always work (these things broke in updates, I believe). Of course now the two years of updates are gone. I could have bought a Nexus 9 when these problems cropped up, but if I had I would have had four months of official updates (Nexus 9 discontinued in June, official updates ended in October)
Had a similar issue on a galaxy s4 in cold weather (particularly when launching the camera app). The battery was ~3+ years old though.
After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.
My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself (there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.
I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon batteries.
I was going to buy a Google Pixel C laptop, but there were reports of really bad wifi performance. Looks like I have yet another reason to pass :/. If the Phone is having basic problems like battery life, I don't have loads of confidence in the laptop.
It seems to me like most of the problems of modern tech are related to quality yet everyone is rushing for new features and quantitative "improvements".
[+] [-] mancerayder|9 years ago|reply
The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery, which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.
I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it. I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7 has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top bulletpoint.
What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries, keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the hardware vendors.
I'm baffled.
[+] [-] btym|9 years ago|reply
As a tech professional who can afford to be a little fiscally irresponsible once in a while... the Pixel has been by far the best phone I've ever owned.
This is the first Android phone I feel has really challenged Apple's obsessively airtight design. I have never noticed a stutter, the camera is absurdly fast and shoots great photos, and the battery lasts nearly twice as long as my 5X.
Google has historically provided the cheaper, higher-barrier phones, but they're attempting to catch up while users are becoming lukewarm on Apple. I think they nailed it.
[+] [-] avar|9 years ago|reply
I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast, if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.
[+] [-] untog|9 years ago|reply
We did, but based on your preceding paragraphs, what we need is reliability, not variety. I don't miss keyboards on phones, and swappable batteries don't feel all that different from portable batteries (which are easier to charge).
But, you're not wrong. The devices themselves are incredibly unreliable, and feel like they're getting worse. I wonder if it's because there is now a pressure that you must have a new phone out every year, even if you don't have one ready or if it isn't really all that worth releasing.
[+] [-] jacek|9 years ago|reply
BTW. I currently have 5X and have no problems with it.
[+] [-] hsivonen|9 years ago|reply
The price isn't even the biggest problem. Google ships the newest phone that gets Android security updates to only 5 countries: https://support.google.com/store/answer/2462844?hl=en
And no, it's not about lack of basic presence. (See Chromecast countries.)
And no, it's not about shipping batteries. (See Pixel C countries.)
[+] [-] nashashmi|9 years ago|reply
I think I have come to the temporary conclusion that phones will always have problems even after several replacements. So all I can do is shrug, and ask why they cannot make phones like they used to.
[+] [-] PaulKeeble|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amckinlay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnatwork|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slouch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitmapbrother|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaosmonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|9 years ago|reply
My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to the battery by shutting down.
Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than 1 minute.
[+] [-] bmm6o|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Klathmon|9 years ago|reply
Assuming you have an extra removable battery charged and on your person at the time, and you still need to shutdown your device to do it.
And assuming you want to either juggle charging multiple batteries in the phone, or you get an external charger.
[+] [-] acconrad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelrunyon|9 years ago|reply
Literally fluctuates between 40%, 1%, 31%, off and don't get me started on how it changes when it gets cold outside.
[+] [-] jasminz|9 years ago|reply
Anyways, I did what most people do not do and unlocked bootloader, installed TWRP and Pure Nexus Project 7.1.1 ROM and am happy to report that issue is now completely gone (I did stress-test it several times in below zero temperatures) !
So, no - it does not seem to be a hardware issue.
[+] [-] anthony_romeo|9 years ago|reply
And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable battery to avoid these problems.
More generally, this season's phones are also cheap-looking and cheap-feeling. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me, looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).
2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.
[+] [-] Twirrim|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Meegul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usloth_wandows|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart2|9 years ago|reply
If it is software, I'd strongly suspect something at kernel level, since quite a few times in my experience, the shutdown is too quick for a safe shutdown. Userspace seems to get a notification that battery is low because it usually gives the "shutting down" alert, but then just shuts off in a suspiciously short amount of time.
I'd be more likely to think it's probably something in the battery/power stack that's not managing or reporting the power well. Discharge/voltage curves are not at all linear, [1] [2], so it's logical that issues with immediately available voltage might start to affect the device around the 30% level. Additionally, as another commenter has mentioned, the discharge curve is dependent upon temperature [3], so a sudden drop in ambient temperature will eventually have a direct effect on the reported voltage.
I'm not exactly sure what kind of metrics are commonly used for reporting battery percentage, but I am about to read a few (okay, maybe half of one) Arxiv papers that came up in a search. [4] Presumably, it's strongly based on some voltage modeling and I can imagine that would have a hard time coping with external factors beyond its measurement capacity, like ambient temperature drops. I don't suppose a user would be happy to see their reported battery percentage drop like a rock immediately upon stepping outside.
I really don't know where I was going with all that, except I guess to say that my gut says Battery "percentage" is a bit more an art than a science. That is to say, there are psychological reasons not to report based on voltage directly (it may go up if you step into a warmer room; "Wat?"), and I can imagine any metric is going to have its strengths and weaknesses, because you really can't account as much for user behavior that changes important physical conditions of the battery.
[1] http://www.powerstream.com/AA-tests.htm
[2] http://www.ibt-power.com/Battery_packs/Li_Ion/Lithium_ion_te...
[3] http://www.ibt-power.com/Battery_packs/Li_Ion/Li_Ion_DiscTGp...
[4] https://www.google.com/search?q=battery%20percent%20site%3Aa...
[+] [-] mmastrac|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone-shu...
[+] [-] eridius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cft|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mustacheemperor|9 years ago|reply
It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying "play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or shuffle plays it out of the search.
Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to push for higher quality at the state of the art.
[+] [-] rottyguy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TD-Linux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
Over at Facebook people had to be ordered to carry Android devices because their app was lagging behind the iOS version.
The Pixel line of devices seems like Google's attempt at dogfooding their own platforms.
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered_|9 years ago|reply
After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.
My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself (there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.
I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon batteries.
[+] [-] dorianm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dajohnson89|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mschuster91|9 years ago|reply
Seriously, looks like battery management isn't exactly the strength of today's device manufacturers -.-
[+] [-] raindev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boterock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darpa_escapee|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffreyhale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] st3fan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scosman|9 years ago|reply
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