Also I’m not sure Pixel actually counts as a premium phone.
As far as msrp price goes i’d say they are in the premium segment price wise, but at least here in Germany they pretty much immediately are available at great discounts at least in combination with mobile plans.
You are right that hardware wise they aren’t necessarily at the top, especially when compared to some of the chinese brands. But in return you get clean software and very long support. And even though the camera might not have the greatest specs the immediate results (which is what matters to most consumers) are consistenly ranked among the best.
Vanilla Android sucks now IMO, it gets a little bit worse with every update, other vendors are actually batter at maintaining sanity IMO.
It’s like vanilla has changes for changes sake, and all the new stupid AI feature they try to push on everything is extremely annoying IMO.
Vanilla Android used to be a feature, but not anymore IMO.
I admittedly don’t have enough comparison, since my last phones were all pretty much stock android (2x pixel and before that a nokia/hmd with android one. I do have a Samsung tablet, but only a lower one without Samsung dex, which i assume would be the most interesting vendor feature? What special features am i missing out on?
What i do however like is that they don’t come with google apps and another set of vendor specific ones by default. Some of them might be better than the default, but when i am unsatisfied by that i rather just choose a replacement myself and download it e.g. from fdroid store.
As far as msrp price goes i’d say they are in the premium segment price wise, but at least here in Germany they pretty much immediately are available at great discounts at least in combination with mobile plans.
You are right that hardware wise they aren’t necessarily at the top, especially when compared to some of the chinese brands. But in return you get clean software and very long support. And even though the camera might not have the greatest specs the immediate results (which is what matters to most consumers) are consistenly ranked among the best.
I agree except for this:
Vanilla Android sucks now IMO, it gets a little bit worse with every update, other vendors are actually batter at maintaining sanity IMO.
It’s like vanilla has changes for changes sake, and all the new stupid AI feature they try to push on everything is extremely annoying IMO.
Vanilla Android used to be a feature, but not anymore IMO.
I admittedly don’t have enough comparison, since my last phones were all pretty much stock android (2x pixel and before that a nokia/hmd with android one. I do have a Samsung tablet, but only a lower one without Samsung dex, which i assume would be the most interesting vendor feature? What special features am i missing out on?
What i do however like is that they don’t come with google apps and another set of vendor specific ones by default. Some of them might be better than the default, but when i am unsatisfied by that i rather just choose a replacement myself and download it e.g. from fdroid store.
Google android really isn’t vanilla at this point.
You get Google apps for like everything now
Vanilla means the original unmodified.
And the Pixel version of Android is per definition the vanilla version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_software