Review: Can Google’s Pixel 6 Pro Get Me To Say Goodbye To More Than A Decade Of Samsung Smartphones?

Never Miss Another Deal - Follow DansDeals on Facebook

From 2002 through 2011 I was an avid PalmOS phone fan, moderating a PalmOS phone forum, and moving from the Samsung i330, i500, and i550 to the Treo line after Samsung killed off their Palm phones. After PalmOS was killed off, I have been on the Samsung bandwagon since 2011, going from the Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S4, Note 4 Edge, Note 8, and currently the Note 10+.

Over that time, Samsung killed off some features that I loved, like having a user replaceable battery and an IR remote control, but they still had some unique features like magnetic payment via Samsung Pay and micro-SD storage.

But Samsung killed off those final features earlier this year and they failed to release a new Note phone this year. It’s unclear if there will be another Note released in the future.

Instead of releasing a Note in August, they released 2 foldable phones. I was not a fan.

Since LG punted on Android phones, Samsung has had precious little competition in the premium Android space.

In recent years, Google has positioned their Pixel phones as a mid-market device with middling specs. But Google stepped it up with its own Tensor chip for this year’s Pixel 6 and positioned the phone as a Galaxy killer with top-tier specs, and an all new eye catching design.

The phone has been getting positive to rave reviews, though there have been reviews of how buggy the phone can be.

The Pixel 6 offers a 128GB version for $599 and 256GB for $699.

The Pixel 6 Pro offers a 128GB version for $899, 256GB for $999, and 512GB for $1,099. It adds additional RAM, an ultra-wideband 5G chip, a bigger battery, a slightly larger and higher def OLED screen with 120Hz, a rear telephoto camera, and a more powerful front camera to the base 6 model.

My Note10+ has 256GB internal memory and a 256GB SD card, so I splurged for the 512GB Pixel 6 Pro so that I wouldn’t have any memory crunch issues without an SD slot. That means spending an extra $200 for the memory that a $20 memory card would provide. Talk about progress…

My first impressions were not great, though some of them may be nitpicking and attributable to my personal preferences and being with Samsung for so long. I’m no tech reviewer, so I’ll just share my thoughts as I used the Pixel 6 Pro for the past 2 weeks.

Google Contacts imported everyone who I ever emailed into my Pixel 6 Pro. While Samsung has an option to exclude contacts without a phone number, Google in their infinite wisdom has no such option.

To workaround that, I had to turn off contact sync from my Google account, delete all the contacts, and then import the contact list from my Note10+.

Incredibly, the Pixel 6 does not have a face unlock option. Face Unlock with smart lock were my go to security options on my Note10+. I love that the phone instantly unlocks when I look at it, rather than having to use a fingerprint reader.

Instead of face unlock, the Pixel 6 has an in-screen fingerprint reader and at first, it was truly horrendous. Since then, Google pushed a mid-cycle software update that has made it far more tolerable with fewer rejections, but it’s still slow. Smart lock on the Pixel brings you to a lock screen that must be swiped away, adding to the annoyance factor. In frustration I disabled all security, but that locked me out of using apps like Google Pay and using fingerprints to login to apps as Pixel won’t allow you to use secure apps or use fingerprint login without security enabled on your phone.

Finally I just added a 30 minute period after the last use where the phone remains unlocked. That’s not very secure, but it bypasses the security annoyances of the phone, the lock screen, and allows me to use secure apps. However when I go past 30 minutes, it now wants me to enter my PIN instead of fingerprint due to it being “manually locked.” It’s just one of the many quirks of the Pixel.

I enjoy Samsung’s scrolling screenshot. The Pixel 6 offers it in some applications, but it’s quirky. It drops off headers in apps like WhatsApp, so you can’t see who it’s from. In Chrome it didn’t work at all, until I found a workaround. I had to update the app, put in “chrome://flags” into the address bar, scroll down to “scroll capture” and change it to “enabled” before I took take a longer screenshot in Chrome. Go figure. Oddly in a phone full of gestures, there’s no easy gesture like Samsung’s hand swipe to take a screenshot.

What was really annoying was that WhatsApp failed to restore the media from my Note10+, and even when I manually copied the media folder over from my old phone, it still wouldn’t backup my data as it hadn’t restored it over the air. After doing some research, it appears to be a relatively common Pixel 6 bug and it happens when the WiFi or mobile data starts to hang, causing WhatsApp to fail at restoring media. WhatsApp was also crashing when I tried attaching photos, making the app a real mess.

I had to uninstall WhatsApp, power cycle the phone (which isn’t done with the phone’s power button unless you change it from Google Assistant to do that), and reinstall my old backup. It failed at restoring the media again, so I had to do that whole process yet again. I lost 4 days of chats doing that and in order to get the media reinstalled, I had to keep toggling between WiFi and mobile data to get WhatsApp to keep restoring the media backup without freezing.

Bizarrely, that’s not easy. That’s because Google removed the WiFi and Mobile data toggles from the drop down settings. Instead you need to hold down the internet tile, and only then can you turn WiFi on and off. While the phone does have 5G coverage compared to 4G on my Note10+, I generally found weaker WiFi and mobile data coverage on the Pixel.

The phone itself also seems to run hotter than the Note10+.

The screen off button on the Pixel 6 Pro is higher than where my thumb normally reaches as it’s placed above the volume rocker. On my Note10+ the power button is below the volume rocker, but I rarely used it as I turned the screen on and off by double tapping it or by using the Samsung one hand operation+ gestures to swipe from the side and turn the screen off. But Google doesn’t offer double tap to turn off the screen and swiping to the side in Android 12 functions as the back key.

Speaking of Android 12 gestures, having to swipe up and hold in the middle to access recent applications is ridiculously convoluted and slow. But if you opt out of Android 12 gestures you lose the ability to use one-handed mode on the Pixel. Not that you’re missing much, as one-handed mode is half-baked compared to the Note10+ as you can’t view the whole screen without it being cut off and inaccessible.

I used Boldbeast to record my phone calls on my Note10+. That has come in handy on a few occasions when companies have promised me something and then reneged. It’s how I only pay $100/year for this card. Boldbeast wouldn’t even open on the Pixel but CubeACR worked, albeit with an annual fee versus a one-time purchase.

Bluetooth on the Pixel 6 Pro was much buggier than on my Note10+. The phone struggled to connect to multiple bluetooth headphones and didn’t play as nice with my Tesla as my Note10+ does. With my Note10+ I never have to use my Tesla backup key, but I needed it multiple times with the Pixel and struggled to keep connected it to the car for phone calls.

Android 12’s “Material You” theme matched the colors of your menus to your phone’s wallpaper. I never thought I’d care of my phone’s menus matched the Maui sunset of a family photo shoot and after having it, I still don’t get what the fuss is. You can also make your apps appear in near greyscale with “Material You.” Yay?

The Pixel 6 Pro may be the slowest charging phone I’ve ever seen. It takes a full 2 hours to charge from 10% to 100% full using my Samsung 45W ultra-fast charger and longer than that with a traditional charger. That would take 50 minutes or less on my Note10+. Now, the Pixel battery life is better than on my Note10+, but with my heavy usage, it’s not long enough to last a full day. And the slow charging speed is an annoyance. Google says that slow charging means that the battery is also slower to lose a charge and will last longer in the long run. That’s all fine, but a 2 hour charge time is just too long in my opinion. Gosh, do I miss swappable batteries!

One bug that I haven’t been able to solve is that the screen is constantly waking up on its own. That’s especially true if I’m holding it, but also happens in my pocket or even on my desk or right after I turned the screen off. The Google Assistant is also very aggressive and searches for things and does things it thinks I asked for, when I did not.

Another persistent bug that I encountered was the screen flickering in low-light situations. It seemed to be trying to determine what the brightness should be, but sometimes would keep switching enough to give me a headache. You can turn off adaptive brightness, but then you would have to swipe down from the settings menu twice to toggle the brightness when you change environments.

Needing to swipe down twice in Android 12 to reach the icon to open the full settings menu or to get to most settings options was one of the many pet peeves I had with the new OS. Why would you want to add more swipes to navigate?

Even less excusable are the Pixel’s impossible to remove “At a glance” and Google search bars on the launcher home screen. My Note 10+ offers 7 rows of apps of the home screen. The Pixel 6 Pro is even taller than my tall Note 10+, but it offers a stingy 5 rows of apps due to the “At a glance” and Google search bar. I tried turning off “At a glance,” which offers useful suggestions like when to leave to the airport if you want to be there 3 hours before flight time, to no avail. The Pixel still won’t let you put anything across the entire top row. And the Google search bar can’t be moved from the bottom row. It’s a beyond frustrating design choice.

The Pixel 6 Pro is less wide, but it’s noticeably thicker, heavier, and taller than my Note10+. In general, I found that my typing (manually and with swype) was much less accurate then on the Note10+, perhaps due to the narrower screen. I expected that to get better, but even after 2 weeks I was making more errors on the Pixel than on my Note.

The phone is ultra-slick, so having a case for it is practically a requirement. I’m not even sure why Google offers a gesture option for tapping the back of the phone, you would have to be a daredevil to use it uncased. I tried out the Spigen Ultra Hybrid and the Spigen Thin Fit and preferred the latter as it was thinner and lighter.

Yikes. That rant was even longer than I expected. It’s not all bad. There are some Pixel features that are truly awesome.

The camera is the best I’ve seen on a smartphone. The magic eraser works well most of the time and will remove unwanted people and items from pictures. It’s pretty slick.

I love that the always on screen shows you the title of the music that’s playing around you.

The phone tree and hold functions are game changers. When you call a company with a phone tree, it will transcribe the options so that you don’t need to pay attention to what the 10 options are, you can just read them on the screen. And when you’re placed on hold you can put your phone down and it will tell the rep when they answer to please hold for you, while it notifies you that there’s a live person to talk to. I can’t understate how useful that feature is.

Call screening for unknown numbers worked perfectly.

The voice recorder with transcriptions is also a great feature. And I enjoyed being able to put the phone face down to enable “Do Not Disturb” mode.

I didn’t miss the Note’s S-pen that much, so I was OK moving on without it, though it does come in handy for taking selfies and some copy and pasting that Android struggles with.

In general, the Pixel is very snappy and performs well, plus has many nifty features. If you’re not coming from a Samsung phone, some of the things that bothered me may not bother you. But it’s just too half baked for me.

I went back to my Note10+ last night and will see how the S22 line stacks up when it’s released next year. My WhatsApp media restored flawlessly without intervention overnight.

It took over 3 years for the Note8 to make me part with my beloved Note4 Edge, so maybe I’ll just keep nursing my Note10+ until it reaches end of life. It’s sad to see things regressing, but I’m not going to spend money to gain some nifty features while introducing a plethora of annoyances.