Google’s Pixel 2 XL is absurdly close to being perfect

I love that Google is giving Apple a serious run for its money now. If you care about photo quality at all, the Pixel is now the absolute best choice. That's only a good thing, even if you prefer the iPhone X or whatever else, as more competition nailing this means we all get better cameras faster.

Integration

Having had Google Home for a few months now, I underestimated how much combining Assistant with Home would be a game changer. Having an assistant that actually works and isn't subject to the sandboxing Apple imposes on Siri is awesome. I now find myself using voice far more often because it works as you'd expect, rather than half of the answers requiring you use some first-party Apple app.

Here's an example: "OK Google, play Radiohead from Spotify on the TV" is magic. First, if the Google Home is in earshot and picks up the command, it takes care of it, but if it isn't, the phone will handle it. That handoff is awesome, but what happens next is even better: the TV turns on, Spotify opens up and it's actually playing.

Rinse and repeat for your own favorite music service, but this is a great example of how Google has finally made this ecosystem better than the competition by not shoeboxing each device or locking down what developers are able to do.

Another great command I'm using on a daily basis is for home lighting. Our dutch house has some weird plug placement, so I purchased a few smart switches to turn on devices without fumbling with long extension cables. Thanks to how well this integrates, I can now ask my phone or Google Home to turn on the stairway lights and it's near instant.

One other hardware feature that surprised me with its legitimate utility is this squeeze for assistant function, where if you give the phone a quick squeeze it'll open Assistant. I use this every day to pull it up, and it's so much better than needing to hold down a button or say 'Hey Siri' whenever you want to summon it. Color me surprised!

There are some weird oversights here, which I hope Google will address soon. If you get more than one Home, or Chromecast audio you're able to set up groups for multi-room music which previously required a fancy system like Sonos.

This is great, and we use it on a regular basis in our home except it's sometimes gloriously stupid. Here's an example: if you're playing music in the kitchen and living room, but move to the office and want to bring the music you'd assume saying "play the music here" would drag it in, but Google responds "there's nothing playing right now" even though I can clearly hear it.

The same happens in the opposite direction. Want to stop the kitchen music to watch a movie? Well, one would assume you could say "stop the music" but that will summon the same response that there's nothing playing.

It's a bizarre oversight for a system that generally works really well -- throwing music into a room with your voice is legitimately useful and puts the need to tap through Sonos' app to get something to play to shame.

Software / day-to-day

One of my biggest fears switching to Android was a lack of consistent design, or a rift in the quality of apps. It's fairly safe to say that the meme that constantly comes up when you share that you're switching to Android is people telling you they heard the apps were horrible based on that one time they tried Android in 2013 pre-Material Design.

It's been the complete opposite.

I spent a lot of time mulling what makes Material Design and the latest versions of Android so visually compelling and it's actually something I didn't realize at first: apps are full of color, playful animation and fun design flourishes. Where iOS has become flat, grey and uniform, Google went the opposite direction: bright colors, full-on fluid animations and much, much more.

Third party apps have really started to embrace Material Design and the consistency level is approaching that of iOS, with unique ideas I've not seen on that side of the fence.

Flamingo, an extremely popular Twitter alternative for Android, is arguably on-par with iOS' Tweetbot and allows you to change the layout or color to fit your preferences. Relay, a Reddit app, does much the same but also makes it far easier to browse the site for hours with rich inline post viewing.

Other useful tidbits come from Android having more open interfaces for developers. One of my favorites here is that Spotify and Sonos are able to show persistently on the lock screen so you can skip songs, even if you're Chromecasting. Another, which is a life-changer, is that 1Password can work everywhere rather than just wherever developers decided to put it.

One I discovered this week allows my phone to remain unlocked provided I'm within my home location and connected to WiFi, so if I pick it up I don't have to fudge around to unlock it. There are so many of these handy small things that it's not practical to list them out.

Perhaps my favorite differentiator, which I've been complaining about on iOS for years, is that the home screen isn't a wasteland of icons organized top-down. You can fill it with icons on the Pixel if you please, or you can actually see inside your calendar and get the weather without fluffing around with 3D Touch or the notification center.

This is hands-down one of the best parts of the Pixel XL 2, simply because you can arrange everything at the bottom of the phone where your thumb actually is.

Then there's the tiny design flourishes that Google has put throughout this device. A few days into using it, the ambient display (which is fantastic, by the way) suddenly had a new line of text when I was sitting in a cafe: the name of the song that was playing in the background.

Not only was this a whoa moment, it's legitimately useful and Google has gone out of its way to make it non-disruptive and not require the internet or actively sending your microphone data somewhere else to be processed.

These tiny awesome things are everywhere: just yesterday I discovered that inside the wallpaper app Google offers a ton of background libraries which update on a daily basis and can auto-change your wallpaper every morning. Sure, it's not a game changer, but it's dope.

A feature I found just this week thanks to a tip from my buddy Justin, is that you can use the fingerprint sensor on the back to your advantage: turn on a setting and you can swipe down on it to pull down on the notification center and get the quick buttons -- a great fix for how far away the top edge of the screen is.

This 'thumbability' is something Google appears to be focusing on right now, with recent beta builds of Chrome including a new version with the address bar on the bottom which makes so much more sense.

Android's notification system is another delight: they're actually useful. Much has been written about this elsewhere, but it makes the iOS version (which I essentially ignored because it's so useless) look like a toy.

Because there are persistent icons (which can be disabled, yes) I'm able to triage things so much better and gauge at 1000 feet what things are important -- and I can snooze them if I need to deal with whatever it is later.

The cherry on that cake is the ambient display, which is a great tool for super-distractible people like me. I leave my phone on my desk all day, and rather than waking up the entire freaking screen for every notification, a new icon slides in.

If it's an important enough message, it can display the content in black and white while still not waking it. I totally underestimated how awesome this is, and it's become something I wouldn't want to live without.

I do take issue with how Android deals with notifications sometimes, however: vibrations are enabled by default for basically everything, which I hate, and almost all apps share the same noise out of the box making it difficult to distinguish what's going on without pulling out your phone.

On top of this, I couldn't even figure out where the setting to disable the vibration was for a ton of apps because some, like Allo, have settings in notifications and their own settings. Bizarre, and seriously needs fixing. I never thought I'd miss iOS' mute switch!

A big gap in my life, which I still miss, is the Apple Watch. Tracking fitness was something that became very important to me, and the lack of fantastic hardware in this area has been a bummer. I'm considering getting a Nokia Steel HR, but I'm dubious about how long the hardware will last.

A respite here is that Google Fit, the company's HealthKit competitor, is superb: it can automatically detect cycling, walking and a bunch of other activities and tracks them in the background (with permission) so you have rich health data.

To get this on iOS I'd had to use the battery-draining Moves app, but it couldn't distinguish cycling from walking reliably and didn't track location very well. With Fit, my Gyroscope data is even more awesome.

I could talk about why I'm enjoying Android until you eventually fall asleep, but at a fundamental level switching across at this point made iOS feel old and disjointed.

As someone who previously owned a Watch, a Mac and all the other widgets that go with the ecosystem I thought it worked well together but Google's ecosystem is straight-up seamless at this point and the relaxed restrictions, for better or worse, mean that there's so much more legitimately useful UX patterns developers are able to use.

Much of this is because Google has spent an insane amount of time building out a seriously good software and hardware story that "just works" better than anything Apple's got right now.

Because you can go and get a Home Mini for $39, a Chromecast for $49 and a TV that has Android built in, the story is so much more coherent and generally works exactly how you'd expect. Fling your music there, throw some TV here, whatever -- it just works.

I'm sure almost every reply to this blog will be "but what about iMessage." This line is so frustratingly tired that I don't even want to talk about it: iMessage is not that good and your friends use more than one message service, guaranteed. If you're sticking with a platform because of a walled-in messaging service alone, that's pretty sad.

OK Google, Give me a verdict

This phone is extremely my shit. Google has taken the original Pixel, which was interesting but not enough to tempt me into switching, and made it into something that's near perfect.

In a year where the iPhone X, which Apple touts as the future phone, only has a single interesting feature (Face ID) Google has embraced the opportunity to show a different future with arms wide open. It's the first time I can confidently say an Android device is great coming from the iPhone without constantly saying but there's this one thing.

I'll confess, Face ID is a magic UX paradigm that I'm ever so slightly envious of, but the lack of any polish or push toward making iOS better in a meaningful way over the last few years has put Apple on the back foot. Also, I like Touch ID and having it on the back is totally fine™.

For the first time, when someone says but iCloud has x feature I'm able to confidently say that Google has an alternative and it's actually better.

My biggest observation from this move has been that phones are converging at a rapid pace: we're discussing rectangles, and much of what matters is whether or not it plays nice with your other devices and services.

Until a few years ago Google just had no coherent strategy here, but it's astounding how quickly it's accelerated past Apple's devices and services play. You can argue all you want that Apple's integrations appear better on the surface but lord, it falls apart quickly when you use it daily.

By owning the Pixel brand and pushing into it even harder this year, it's paying off for Google. These phones are legitimately awesome, and make iOS seem like a mess of UX patterns that require constant dipping in and out of activities.

Most of all, Google's embrace of color, animation and fun hardware design is great. Once you get a Google Home it's something you want in every room, and then the Pixel just reinforces this.

If this is just Google's second attempt at phone hardware it's a home-run. I can't wait to see what's coming next.

Like:

• Gobsmackingly good camera
• Great performance, zero lag
• Design language finally on point
• Hardware / software ecosystem is more coherent than Apple

No like:

• Weird notification defaults
• I miss my Apple Watch 😢
• If something goes wrong there's no physical store I can go to
• God, I need to get more USB-C cables

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