Just FYI, this seems to depend on where you get the Pixel from - if bought directly from Google, it should be offline-unlockable out of the box. The carrier-sold Pixels are a different story because the carriers demanded it.

Of course check this is true for the specific model you’re buying before you actually buy it, but for me the unlock was never greyed out on my 7a.

Pixel - varies by manufacturer

That was the Nexus line, Pixel phones are all made by Google. Although Pixel 5 series and older use Snapdragon SoCs, while 6 onwards use Google’s custom Tensor based on Samsung’s Exynos. The major downside is IMHO the awful modem efficiency - if I want to keep mobile network on so that I can receive calls, my 7a is limited to 2 days of battery life if I’m lucky (and that’s with barely using the phone, just a few pictures).

Edit: and I forgot to mention that all Pixels have great third party ROM support, except if you want GrapheneOS, in which case you need to go for the recent ones that are still supported by Google.

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If you don’t sign into a Google account, you will never arm this mechanism at all.

Nah, this development version is way worse than both Android 12+ design and Android 11 design - it just has random unlabeled tiles for system settings where you have to guess the meaning by the icon.

In Android 11, this was only used for the six quick settings you could access when you were looking at the notifications, and they would get labels when you expanded the settings side. In 12+, there are no unlabeled settings anywhere. But this redesign introduced unlabeled tiles for settings you don’t use often, which just seems insane to me.

Wow, first time I feel strongly about a quick settings update. It looks awful, taking the worst parts of the Android 12+ redesign and combining them with the worst ideas from the older design, like unlabeled icons.

It looks like there are unlabeled icons in the expanded state? Wtf? If I’m expanding the quick settings, that means I’m fishing for the less used settings, so there’s no way I’m going to remember that for example the weird circle with a small segment cut out means “Data saver”. It will just be a mystery icon that does some mystery action - that has nothing to do in a modern OS.

It looks like this design is heavily sacrificing usability for people who don’t spend hours every day mucking around with quick settings in order to please some hypothetical user who feels more slowed down by swiping over one or two screens than by having to find the one setting they currently need in a big matrix of poorly designed icons.

Edit: also it looks like the home screen is visible under the quick settings - I’m not a big fan of that, I really like the current design where the notifications are pretty much their own separate screen without distracting app content, but that’s just my subjective taste. Unlabeled icons are objectively bad.

Circle to search for music is pretty much just a shortcut to Google’s music detection available from the normal Google app

You’re supposed to use fingers

It’s easy to dismiss as an ad. I did, too.

Well, Vivaldi’s built-in in adblock apparently agrees with this categorization. The video shows up if I disable it. Lol

Where’s the article?

In my very limited experience with my 5400rpm SMR WD disk, it’s perfectly capable of writing at over 100 MB/s until its cache runs out, then it pretty much dies until it has time to properly write the data, rinse and repeat.

40 MB/s sustained is weird (but maybe it’s just a different firmware? I think my disk was able to actually sustain 60 MB/s for a few hours when I limited the write speed, 40 could be a conservative setting that doesn’t even slowly fill the cache)

Sounds like most of that would be handled by the kernel with non-Deck-specific modules - it won’t forget to notify the userspace that a device has disappeared just because it was in sleep mode at the time it was physically disconnected.

The only problems I ever had with sleep on Linux were all inability to wake up some part of the motherboard or the GPU because of crappy firmware, never with connecting/disconnecting external stuff.

Seems more like a featureless slab to me

apps that are programmed by a 13 year old that wants to scam people.

That’s a weird way to spell “project manager who doesn’t let developers waste time making efficient apps when they could just add more marketable features”. The competition won’t hesitate, and users will always flock to apps with more features and nicer UI over optimizations.

People need to learn how to close apps.

If you have enough RAM, there’s no reason to - it’s not like they are actually running and consuming CPU cycles. If you don’t have enough RAM, you also don’t need to - Android will do it for you. My phone with 3 GB of RAM could barely handle maps and a browser at once, so there were plenty of times when the map app restarted and recentered on my current position when I came back from checking the website of whatever company I looked at.

The recent apps screen is really just a history of open apps, with some of them maybe still in memory, and with some opaque mechanism for automatically removing old entries. You can reboot your phone and the apps will still be there with a screenshot of their last state. Doesn’t mean they will get back to that state when you switch to them.

The huge amount of RAM on Android in general is less about supporting a single hungry app and more about keeping as many apps as possible in memory so that you can multitask between them without any of them losing their state. If one app manages to eat most of the memory, then it’s already too little for the intended experience.

Also the memory is supposed to be enough for at least the 7 years this phone will be supported for - that’s plenty of time for apps memory footprint to grow.

Maybe I’m biased by always having used devices with RAM size in the lower end (which is always also coupled by a not-so-great CPU so when you do run out of memory and the system starts killing apps you want to multitask between, you’re going to notice it that much more), but I’ll always take more RAM in a device that might survive a decade with a couple of battery swaps.

manufacturers can put it where your hand naturally rests, meaning that you can unlock the phone BEFORE you have even taken it out of your pocket.

Idk, my “unlock” finger naturally rests wherever the fingerprint scanner is on my phone. When I had a rear fingerprint scanner, I used to have my phone’s bottom right corner planted into my palm near the thumb and used the index finger to support its back near the scanner, so I was always ready to unlock it.

Now that I have an under-screen scanner, I use my pinky as a “shelf” for the phone’s bottom side, ring finger to hold it on the far side and index finger along the near side (which makes me suspect this grip would work for in-power-button scanners too), and that makes my thumb naturally rest exactly on the spot where the scanner is. With (one) tap to wake, I have no problem unlocking the phone while taking it out of my pocket - literally just a quick double tap. Although it’s true that you can’t unlock the phone directly in the pocket like this, because the proximity sensor should prevent the tap to wake from working.

I used to have a phone with a scanner in the power button too, but I can’t remember how I held it - I don’t think it was the same way as now, because I’m pretty sure I never used to rest my thumb on screen like this.

So now I’m looking at that kind of parasitic situation with this FRP bypass lock. It’s almost as if the manufacturer wants phones to be thrown in the garbage so users are forced to buy from them rather than aftermarket. Noooooo. /s

It’s a theft deterrent, so it would be kind of pointless if there was an intentional way to disable it other than to log in with the owner’s account. The people providing the tools to bypass FRP want their cut of the stolen goods, that’s all.

I’m not saying that your specific phone is stolen (although if you got it in this state… yeah, it most likely is, FRP triggers when you do a factory reset from the recovery instead of going through settings), but you have to understand that what you want is exactly what a thief would want, and the proce of the tools reflects that.

Your mileage may vary - your experience might be different for one reason or another

Google definitely has the ability to do that, but I don’t believe it’s currently happening. First, it could get them in pretty big trouble in parts of the world that have the concept of consumer protection if anyone ever got ahold of any proof (and Google seems pretty terrible at keeping secrets). Second, have you seen ANY negative review of a phone? Every time I was researching which phone to buy, all the reviews were always very positive and avoided talking about its weak spots.

For example, my old Nokia 5.3 - every review I found, both in English and in my native language, made the phone sound like it is an acceptable phone for its price - nothing terrible and nothing outstanding. I doubt most of them even tried using half the features, because the rear fingerprint scanner was completely unusable (it got a nice 50/50 success rate if the air was dry and I had perfectly clean non-sweaty fingers, and plummeted down to maybe 10% success rate if any of these conditions wasn’t met), the touchscreen had ghost touch issues in even slightly humid air (meanwhile other phones work fine even with droplets of water on the screen in light rain), the camera app took 5 - 10 seconds to be able to take a picture from cold start (and Nokia/HMD didn’t bother to keep it in memory like other OEMs).

The last point might not sound like much, but it actually made me pretty much stop taking photos because anything that moves at all was simply a no go unless I had quite a bit of time to set up. I took a grand total of 732 photos and 28 videos over the three years I had that phone, which is ridiculously few compared to the over 6k photos I took with my previous Xiaomi phone. (talking about the 8k photos I took in a single year with my current phone would be cheating, literally any phone camera would look like a technical miracle to me after Nokia’s shitshow).

(edit: also, after one of the updates, the camera app would often get killed after taking a photo and the photo would be lost - so if you really wanted to take a photo of something, you would often have to try several times until it actually saved it. This was never fixed in the later updates, and the final update even introduced a fun feature where factory reset is now guaranteed to irreversibly brick the device in case you wanted to sell it. This is confirmed by HMD to be a wontfix because the phone is now EOL)

Oh, and the promised updates (it was Android One ffs) were all about a year late and generally very poor quality (also security updates were sparse), but that’s not something a reviewer could tell at the time.

Sorry about the rant, my experience just made me really hate HMD/Nokia. The main point is that all the reviews were incredibly positive even for a crappy phone and a brand that doesn’t seem to be paying off the reviewers - even tiny local reviewers who couldn’t have possibly be on HMD’s radar were way too excited about it.

And my last point: we’re not talking about reviewers here. This is about “#TeamPixel”, Google’s “organic” marketing campaign. They get a phone and hype it up, they’re not even meant to compare it to other stuff.

It’s even worse, they’re not getting paid. These shills only get rewarded by getting the phones slightly before general availability (but after actual reviewers)