Hello, Pixel!
A couple years back while we were in the USA, Sabriena and I splurged at Christmas time on a couple of Moto G4s (to upgrade our original Moto Gs). These were on sale at Best Buy (with the Moto G5 around the corner), and after confirming they’d work in Australia they looked like a pretty great deal, much better than we’d get in Australia.
We bought the 64GB version, which has the 3GB RAM instead of 2GB, and just on the whole I found it an excellent phone for the price. I’d have liked wireless charging, but that’s really the only thing I was missing, and Sabriena absolutely adores hers. Unfortunately, mine has started acting up in the last year or so… the phone gets quite hot and the battery discharges quickly, with it frequently not making it through a day maintaining a charge, despite having removed Facebook et al from it (which helps a lot with battery consumption).
I went on eBay and bought a new battery for it, and after gingerly replacing it (quite the operation) I saw absolutely no improvement. So I’ve been going to buy a new phone for some months now, but the fact is I’m too goddamned cheap and none of the phones below my significantly low pain threshold are anything but a downgrade from this majestic piece of mid-spec Android technology from several years back.
I briefly considered moving to the “fruity” side and trying an iPhone. I’m already a Mac user, and the Apple Watch has some useful tricks like the ability to unlock your Mac without typing my huge passphrase that I frequently screw up. But no, while I’d really like to de-Google my life, drinking the Apple koolaid just seems like replacing a devil I know with a devil I don’t.
Finally, after getting completely sick of it, I noticed that the Pixel 4 is on sale. It’s still well above what I’m comfortable spending on a phone (at about $800AUD), but when you annualize out the time of support versus buying a discounted model from previous years, it was basically equivalent… you see my secondary complaint with the Moto G4 is that it’s out of support, no longer getting security updates. We got the last security update a few months back entirely because it was so serious, but ordinarily security updates won’t be coming. But financially, the only way I can lose now being if I break this phone before it’s time.
I had briefly considered a potential avenue with buying the phone from Vodafone… it looks like I can buy the phone on a mobile repayment plan through them, cancel the plan immediately, and the remainder of MRP would be immediately due… that is I’d owe the rest of the retail value of the phone. But the retail value through Vodaphone is nearly $300 cheaper, so I could come out around $250AUD in front. However I really needed to replace my phone, Vodafone’s sales folks weren’t available on the phone, and I didn’t want to end up inadvertantly committed to keeping a Vodafone plan for two years when it still won’t work at all at my parents’ place.
So no, I bit my lip and bought it straight from Google, and it arrived Thursday. I’ve got it mostly set up, I just need to swap my Google Authenticator data over, something I documented last time, but I’m not sure I can do it as my G4 is not rooted. The new UI for Android takes some getting used to, with gestures replacing the on-screen buttons, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it.
Oh, and the camera’s fucking amazing.
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