14 DAY TRIAL // One week ago, I decided to run an experiment and replace my iPhone XS with a Google Pixel 3 full time.
This idea came after Google launched a campaign called Unswitchable and whose purpose was to show the world that spending three weeks with a Google Pixel 3 makes you love it, regardless of the phone you were previously using.
After one week without my iPhone XS and doing everything on a Google Pixel 3, I’m sorry to say, but I’m still feeling unswitchable.
And ironically, it’s the Google Pixel 3 the one that’s not meeting my expectations and not the differences between Android and iOS.
As tech-savvy users probably know, iPhone fans always claim that iOS overall is more refined than Android, offers a nearly perfect experience out of the box, and boasts increased security with no impact on performance in the long term.
Opinions on each of these points are so far very mixed, and I won’t start a debate to convince you that one is better than the other. Before this experiment, despite using an iPhone XS as my daily driver, I also carried around a Samsung Galaxy Note 9, which I absolutely love, and I really don’t think that the difference between Android and iOS is something that could be a deal breaker for a switcher.
But as I said, I noticed a few small annoyances on the Google Pixel 3 that make me think twice before potentially embracing it full time.
First of all, the 4GB RAM on the device simply isn’t enough. I know, 90 percent of the people wouldn’t even more, but as it turns out, I’m part of the rest of 10 percent. The phone feels slow at random times in multi-tasking, and it happened several time for the Pixel 3 to suspend one or two of the running apps because it doesn’t have more memory to handle them.
Needless to say, having just 4GB RAM on a high-end phone launched in 2018 is unexpected, to say the least, especially because others are already working on 10GB RAM devices.
Then, there’s the performance of the speaker. The December 2018 security update came with a series of silent changes that were noticed by others too and which apparently caused some issues with the lower speaker.
While buzzing speakers aren’t something entirely new on Pixel phones, this became a more noticeable problem on the Pixel 3 after the December update. Some suggest this is a hardware issue that Google is trying to resolve with software patches, and if this is the case, I’m sorry to say this isn’t working.
Also, I thought I could go back easily to using just the fingerprint sensor after relying exclusively on Face ID for so long, but as it turns out, facial recognition is so much more convenient these days. And for some reason, Google removed its original implementation from the Pixel 3 entirely, probably because it’s not considered to be as secure as a version relying on 3D sensing cameras.
Other than that, the Google Pixel 3 feels like a solid phone. The camera performance remains top-notch, and while I was originally afraid that I would struggle with the battery life, this isn’t happening. I still get some 18 hours per charge, and even if this drops occasionally, the super-fast charging mode provides me with some extra juice in just a few minutes.
As promised, I’m going to keep using the Pixel 3 for two more weeks to test Google’s claims as part of the said promo, but as I mentioned earlier, I’m already feeling unswitchable. It’s true, the iPhone has its very own flaws as well, but the problems I mentioned above certainly do not make the Google Pixel 3 a better alternative for the time being.