All right, so i usually keep you all updated on this, but a lot of people ask - and maybe you don't know so. I have access to a lot of different phones and the question is usually is what phone do you use on the daily, so the phone that i keep coming back to after i review a phone for the past year and a half on android has been samsung's Galaxy s21 ultra. So it's a pretty long time. For me, a lot of phones have come out since then, including the s22 ultra, but i keep coming back to this one.

You know it's the design, the display, the cameras are rock solid. The software is really good. Full of features it's been great now a lot of people assumed that it would change to the pixel series when that came out in october, and i really like the phones but, as i said in my review, it's not perfect and then slowly ever since it came Out it's gotten more and more buggy. Now, that's always one of the challenges of reviewing something right.

People usually own their phone for years, but i have to try to experience as much of this as possible in one to two weeks and then condense it all down into a 10 or 20 minute, video or in the pixels case, 21 minutes and 49 seconds. Damn. But yeah a couple weeks and a couple months after the review period, it slowly started unraveling more and more bugs started showing up, and i'm not really sure why. I can't really tell you exactly why it's happening, but i do know now that the pixels seem to be more susceptible to it matter of fact, this exact thing this situation, we're going through now has happened before when i was using the pixel 2 xl.

I had the same thing happen: the bugs got worse and worse up until the point where i stopped using it and switched to. I think it was some oneplus phone that was performing well at the time, and i made a video about it. So i'm not sure what makes the pixel so much more susceptible to it than other phones, but i was hoping that this time you know having their own tensor design chip and getting those quick software updates straight from google would maybe help alleviate that this time. But i was wrong, so this phone came out in october.

By january i was tweeting that my pixel 6 pro has slowly gotten so buggy since launch that i can no longer recommend it at 900, which is still how much it cost by the way straight from google, so that, combined with the botched january software update had Me giving up a little bit and i put my sim card back into the s21 ultra which, by the way, got that january security update before the pixel did, but here we are in april. So it's been a couple months and a couple successful software updates later and hey. If i'm gon na publicly talk about the downfall of the pixel, then they put out some software updates to fix it. I wan na know about it.

I wan na test it, so i've done that six months after launch now i've got my sim card back in the pixel and i've been using it and while it's better than it was it's still not enough to change my opinion on it. So my overall thoughts on this phone are pretty much the same as the review when it came out like i said, i do actually really like this design, which has proved to be polarizing. Some people love it. Some people hate it i'm into it, and you can see all the use now i did get it pretty scratched up.

I got a big gash, a pretty deep one on the top left corner of my display, but that's par for the course. For me. I don't use phone cases all the time, so, yes, it still collects dust all the way around those cameras. Yes, it's showing normal wear and tear from the months of being in and out of pockets on tables and tossed around.

All this is normal and the industrial design itself is still held up, it's very solid, but the question is what were the things that were specifically going wrong with the user experience on this phone that made it such a pain to use? Luckily, i wrote them down, so the big ones for me were number one: it's 120 hertz display, but it was constantly constantly slowing down to way below that way below 90, often below 60, which was annoying this big stuttery animations, all the time opening and closing apps. So that was my number one problem. The camera oh lock, screen and auto brightness were also both terrible, no matter how dim of a room i was in, it would never lower the brightness enough, even though auto brightness was on the fingerprint. Reader is slow compared to the others, and the camera is slowing down.

So since then, i'm now on the march security update and the constant frame drops are 95 fixed and the camera app is back to normal launch speed, love that that was a huge one. For me, but the auto brightness is still bad and the fingerprint reader is still slow compared to the others. Also often when i'm in a dark room - and i turn the flashlight on for some reason - it always decides to raise the brightness of the display way up. Why i don't know i'm still in a dark room and i turn the flashlight on so clearly it's a dark room, but maybe there's some sort of light leakage into the ambient light sensor or something here.

I think that could be fixed with software, but we'll see some other things that didn't make it into my tweet, though the modem and just overall cell connectivity is noticeably worse than other phones which affects battery life. So i have a. I have a dead zone that i drive through on the way to work every day and i can kind of notice with each different phone i'm testing how long it takes to regain signal for the maps app to work again, and this takes longer than any other Phone and i've also had issues with wi-fi calling just that feature specifically and in this studio with double thick glass and all this acoustic treatment. The signal in here isn't great already to start with, and so i rely on wi-fi calling and that feature has not.

Let me make a call in like two days in a row here which is pretty bad and there's still a bunch of subtle stuff. That's not necessarily a bug, but just affects the overall feel of the phone like swiping between the home screen and google. Page should always be pretty smooth. That's a basic animation, but it's not on the pixel awkwardly enough.

Other android phones, like the s21 ultra, have no problem with this, and i also with this phone, have had a weird bluetooth streaming. Random bug to my car like i'll, be listening to music and it'll. Skip like a second of audio like a cd haven't, had a phone do that in a long time, but, like i said, the newest updates have reduced a lot of the like performance problems and the stuttering and the animations that really made it feel bad. So it's better than it was, but if the acceptable level of bugginess for a 900 phone was like here, it used to be up here and now it's here, it's still worse than it should be, but they have made an improvement.

But that being said, this is still a very strange trajectory for the user experience of a smartphone like typically you get a phone and for the first year at least it's peaches nothing's wrong and then, as it ages, it slowly goes downhill over time, but it feels Like the pixels age concerningly quickly and google has to try to stay on top of that with like a frantic software update or two very early, very odd. So at this point i've given the pixel 6 pro another chance and i still don't think people should be buying the pixel 6 pro for 900 bucks. But you know it's been six months so now i'm starting to look forward right. So we have a couple pixel 6a rumors popping up here and there that'll probably come out this summer.

That's probably going to be another phone with this first gen tensor chip, probably a plastic body 1080p display, maybe 90 hertz. That would be nice, probably one to two cameras and that'll be their budget phone for the middle of the year, but i'm very interested in the next generation of tensor chip and the next pixel. Maybe it's just because i'm optimistic! Maybe it's just because i am. I trust that google will finally buckle down the google phone experience and deliver something good, but yeah.

That's this is something we're going to have to keep an eye on now is the way pixels age over time seems to consistently be very different from the way we expect other normal phones to age, but hey, that's just one more factor to consider when reviewing these Things for now, like i've, said my sim card is gon na, be again back in the s21 ultra until the next review anyway. But let me know what your thoughts are in the comments section below. Let's talk about it either way thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one peace.