If it was a Pixel 2 or a 4a I'm keeping it, that phone was peak modern smartphone before everything went downhill with no rear fingerprint scanner and fixed focus selfie cams
Don't have a 4a, but big fan of my 5a with Graphene! The last one with both usb-c AND a headphone jack! It has been my phone of choice since my iPhone SE broke, and it is still my main driver.
I still use Pixel 4 and the fabric case is so great to the touch, too bad the new ones don't have them.
Do you have GrapheneOS installed on it? That way, you could at least get the update to Android 14.
Oof, the Pixel 2 XL was hot garbage. I returned mine four times due to speaker issues, and the fourth was no better.
Wild. Had no issues until the 5th QC wise but it was all downhill from there. I'm now considering carrying a dumb phone and some alternative to a smartphone
Loved my Pixel 2 XL. Upgraded to a P5 a year ago tho. Really amazing phone
I have a 4a 5G variant and I can't stand how the "stock" experience manages to be worse than on my old Samsung :-/ The pics are great tho
I 100% agree. Stock android experience is garbage even compared miui.
GrapheneOS gets rid of all the Google crap, it's a much lighter and more minimal experience, I really like it. It also has some significant privacy and security improvements, it's pretty neat.
Yeah the notch was a couple generations back so I'd put it back too, the dynamic island is much better
-Sent from my iPhone
Death to notches, islands, or whatever. Return to full bezel.
I'm quite happy with the centered hole punch on the latest Samsung made displays. Much less obtrusive than the notch and I can actually see the status icons.
I'd still prefer a full bezel speaker HTC M8 style though.
I’ve always been in favor of the notch. I hate hate hate the island and dots. The small notch allows pace for the camera, time and regular status bar on the sides. Most of the time you don’t even notice.
Baby reindeer!
With both whatever-apple-is-doing and Android's whatever-it-is-called-that-prevent-factory-reset when you don't have access to the account on the device, I don't see how people still buy "shady" phones and tablets.
Last time I borrowed a relative's phone to run an experiment, I had to contact them to "unlock" the phone after a factory reset before being able to do anything because I didn't remove the account before. Unless people go out of their way to make their phone "stealable", that is.
Theives can still dump them in those shady cash for phones machines and walk away with a bit of cash.
I mean, if you can factory reset a phone to strip the need for authentication, that seems like kind of a bad thing, no?
You can factory reset it, but not really. On first boot, the phone requires a network connection; you can't skip setting up wifi if there is no cellular internet available. And it will ask you to authenticate the google account it expect before even starting the "real" setup process. As a matter of fact, once you authenticate with google, it does start again, ask again for wifi and will not have the account setup at all, as you would expect after a factory reset.
So, while you can "factory reset", the phone still needs the previously registered google account to start. There's probably some phone that gives more leniency, but I was not able to circumvent that using adb (the device being locked, and impossible to unlock without accessing the menu, impossible to access without starting in the first place…)
I had to pay $20 to a slightly shady online service cause one of my kids is an idiot and changed all his passwords cause one of the other kids knew them (because he told them...) then proceeded to forget all the new passwords.
So I know that on most models of Samsung phone you can just pay $20 to a slightly shady online service.
Oh now we're all in agreement that the notch was awful
