October 16, 2024

So Long, Small Phones

:(

Bloated Batteries. Again

I have been using a Google Pixel 4 as my phone. Fantastic little device. Takes decent photos, great display, and just the right size. Last year, it got a nice case of “spicy pillow”. The battery had bloated, and I had to replace it. After doing so, I upgraded it to LineageOS 21 (Android 14), and my phone lived happily ever after.

Or so I thought.

I had the thought of taking the case off again for no good reason a couple weeks ago. Well, I did. And there it was. The beginnings of spicy pillow, followed with a bit of a weird chemical fake fruit smell. Not as bad as the first time I had it, or the time my sister’s Pixel 4 XL got it, but bad none the less.

So I bought a new phone. Used, of course

My Pixel 4's spicy pillow.

My sister's Pixel 4 XL's pillow.

The New Phone.

My requirements for a phone are as follows:

1: If Android, it needs a unlockable bootloader and LineageOS compatibility.

2: It needs at minimum one-hundred-and-twenty-eight gigabytes of storage. MicroSD would be nice.

3: It must have a good camera.

Google phones meet all three, except they don’t have expandable storage.

So I took a look at used Google phones. Specifically the Pixel 5. Meh. The phone looked to be a fairly minor upgrade. So I looked at the Pixel 6. The price for one with double my minimum storage requirements squeezed into my budget. I would have bought the Pro. But I decided against it for two reasons: 1: The screen was 0.3 inches bigger. I didn’t want any bigger than I had to, and 2: curved edges. My Note 9 gave me a dislike for them.

A day later, the phone showed up. I opened the box and…

Before I went ahead and bought it, I got a ruler out, measured 6.4 inches, and convinced myself that it’d be small enough. Mmmhmm. This thing was MASSIVE compared to my Pixel 4. The difference really shows itself best if you hold it in your hand after using a tiny phone for a year. The new phone was heavy, it was big, and I got hand strain from holding it the first couple of days.

Pixel 6 compared to previous phones I have used. I used to use the 5s, then the Note 9, switched to a Pixel 4, and now the Pixel 6

I had bought the phone in “good” condition. This means there would probably be minor scratches but the phone would be fully functioning and would work just fine. The back of the phone under the camera bar was just fine. On top of it though? No. It was scratched. Well, I think it was. It is kinda rough. Maybe that’s sand caught in the seafoam. The display was a mostly pleasant surprise. It wasn’t scratched. There is a small area right next to the in-display fingerprint sensor that had a hint of blue that shouldn’t be there. It’s easy to overlook and doesn’t bother me too much. I could not get a photo of it. It’s hard to do that. Other than that, the phone was in fantastic cosmetic shape. But how about my experience using it?

Pixel 6 backside.

Pixel 6 frontside.

I went ahead and turned the thing on. It showed the Google logo while loading in the Android Setup. The first thing that happens on Pixels is a screen with a bouncing circle bouncing on something, while causing the phone to vibrate with each bounce and emphasizing how good Google’s haptic feedback is, along with a button prompting you to set the phone up. I went ahead and followed the setup, including connecting it to WiFi, selling my data to Google, and waiving any rights to a class-action lawsuit (so that Google doesn’t have to fix their problems.) I had a fairly positive first impression with the phone, aside from the size. I set it up with most of the bells and whistle because I wanted to be sure it worked. Everything did. Including the in-display fingerprint sensor, which should have been on the back of the phone instead of the front. I was also pretty excited over better cameras. It’s a shame Google didn’t put a 50 megapixel ultrawide as well, but that’s ok. It has a 50 megapixel main camera, along with a 12 megapixel ultrawide. Both seem fine, and the pictures with the main camera look quite nice. But save that for later. I had other things I wanted to do with the phone. Specifically, installing a custom ROM on it, since I wasn’t satisfied with the default OS.

I ended up choosing LineageOS for a couple reasons.

1: It’s the longest lasting one I can think of. They still have support for the original Google Pixel. I’ve seen other ROMs drop old devices like a hot potato once they are no longer under official support.

2: I like the additional customization options it has. Some of them make life easier, such as a quick pulldown for the control center instead of having to pull the notification shade down twice.

I went ahead, unlocked the bootloader, and installed LineageOS without GApps first for the fun of it. Turns out LineageOS leaves a lot in there that happens to be Google stuff, like Live Translate, Now Playing (music recognition in the background thing), and other stuff. I never used it without the GApps on my other Pixel, and I didn’t know they left that much in there. If you want a true mostly Google-free experience, GrapheneOS is real good about not having that stuff. I don’t like GrapheneOS much though. It feels very plain right out of the box.

I ended up reinstalling complete with GApps. The experience was pretty nice after finishing the setup. It obviously was a different experience from the stock Pixel system, but was just fine with me. I set up the phone to my liking, complete with the Google Camera app (main reason to even have GApps. There’s ways to do it without them, but I want the thing to simply work.)

About screen with LineageOS and Android version numbers.

The experience was fairly normal for me after that. It was just a bit of getting used to things being ever so slightly off from what I am used to due to the larger display. And getting used to the new Google Camera app. My Pixel 4 got stuck on the old version. This phone got the latest and greatest with revamped UI. I have already found it to be pretty nice but pretty annoying. I am very used to just scrolling up one setting to switch to video mode, but Google now has it on its own separate toggle. It did cause some annoyances but I got used to it. The other thing I don’t like is the contrast and brightness controls not being in the spot I’m used to them in. Other than that, it worked great, and takes mostly good pictures. The wide angle does just fine for my purposes. So does the main camera. Unfortunately anything over 1x zoom is digital, but 2x zoom looks alright. Anything over that isn’t going to look great. The selfie camera was fine, but I don’t think it’s going to win any awards. Too bad Google gatekeeps things like the 11MP front camera and 4x telephoto lens for the bigger phone. As a warning, all photos in this post have been compressed so as to reduce the strain on my server. They still look good enough to represent the phone.

Flower with 0.7x wide angle lens.

Flower with 1x lens.

Flower with 2x digital magnification,

Flower with "portrait mode" effect applied.

Agathae eating food off of the ground.

Dominica the Dominique.

Felicitas the Cream Legbar.

Gaby the Welsummer. She is hurt but in the process of healing. More on that later on in the post.

Gaby the Welsummer taken with 7x digital zoom.

Under the Tree of Peace (tree the chooks sit under peacefully), taken with 0.7x wide angle lens.

Josephine and Felicitas sitting together. 2x digital zoom used.

The AI photo editing features are OK at best. Unblur seems to be fine, though I haven’t had a blurry enough photo to really test it with, and Magic Eraser does ok as well, and I have tested it before. It really varies on what you want to edit out. If it’s a small leaf, a power line, or a sliver of a person at the edge of a image, it seems to work fine and works ok. My Pixel 4 has the feature as well and I’ve used it a lot there. Magic Eraser can also suggest things to edit out, and it does a decent job of it, though it does miss things quite often, leaving you to do a bit more editing. I do like how these features run locally on the device instead of sending your photo to Google’s cloud servers. If this used the cloud, I probably would have never bothered use the feature.

Chickens under the tree. This photo is unedited.

This is the above photo, but edited using Magic Eraser. Notice the blobs and rubble that the AI leaves behind. It does terribly with things like this.

Sky with power lines and a bit of tree. This photo is unedited.

Above photo, but edited automatically per Google's suggestion.

Google's suggested editing. See above photo for result.

I’ve been using it for almost a week now, and I’ve gotten used to the weight of the phone. I still have my personal dislikes about it, but I like the phone now. And the extra storage (256GB as opposed to 128) makes for a really nice upgrade, as I can finally fit my 70GB collection of FLAC music files on there without barely having any space left for pictures.

There are other reviews on the internets for this phone, and they go into more depth than mine, as those people seem to know a lot more about cameras and whatnot than I do. Read those if you want another (possibly biased) perspective on the phone. Don’t trust one single guy on the internet for everything.

Other stuff not pertaining to new phones.

I ended up with another unwanted device, this time a 7th generation iPad. It was with a unwanted MacBook Air (mentioned in previous post). It runs iOS 18, and it also turns out that this is the only jailbreakable iOS 18 device. I think I’m going to try it today.

The benchmark project is still going. I just haven’t gotten around to doing it to every single device that can run it. I also found out running Prime95’s stress test and hwinfo to see the temperatures of the poor CPU under said stress test to be quite entertaining.

The chooks have been alright. Unfortunately Gaby got foam in her eyes, and last time I posted on this blog I was distracted with that bird. It seems like she got pecked there, and as far as I’m concerned it healed. She also broke her toe, and my sister has been helping fix it (homemade splint with popsicle stick. Seems to be helping). If you bothered to read my rant about the Pixel, there's pictures of Gaby in there.

I also spent a couple hours repasting some decades-old GPUs. It’s quite satisfying to clean off the thermal paste and put new paste.

That's all for this post.

JM