Slashdot Mirror
Google Unveils Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL With No Headphone Jack (venturebeat.com)
From a report: Google product chief Mario Queiroz today unveiled two new Android 8.1 Oreo smartphones at the company's annual hardware event: the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL. The smaller Pixel 2 sports a 5-inch, 1080p display, with a 16:9 aspect ratio that was until this year the standard on Android flagships. The larger Pixel 2 XL, meanwhile, has a 6-inch, QHD+ display in an 18:9 aspect ratio, in line with 2017's flagship smartphones. The Pixel 2 thus still has a large bezel while the Pixel XL 2 has a noticeably reduced bezel profile, although certainly not the smallest we've seen. As always, smartphone size also dictates battery capacity: 2700 mAh for the Pixel 2 and 3520 mAh for the Pixel 2 XL. Here's the rundown: Snapdragon 835 chipset, 4GB of RAM, either 64GB or 128GB of storage, an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, a 12-megapixel rear camera, front stereo speakers, a fingerprint scanner on the back, a USB-C port on the bottom, and no headphone jack. "Use your existing analog headphones with the included adapter," Queiroz said. [...] The HTC-manufactured Pixel 2 will be available in Just Black, Clearly White, and Kinda Blue on October 19. The LG-manufactured Pixel 2 XL will ship in Just Black and Black & White on November 15. The Pixel 2 will be available for $649 (64GB) and $749 (128GB) while the Pixel 2 XL will come in $849 (64GB) and $949 (128GB) flavors.
Google, please, we need AFFORDABLE Android phones! And by "affordable" we don't mean trashy third-world shit phones, either.
All we want is the next generation of what the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 phones were. Give us reasonably sized phones that have reasonably good displays and reasonably good performance with reasonably good cameras and with reasonably good quality at a reasonably good price.
We don't need top-end everything, but nor do we want bottom-end shit, either. Give us a good middle-of-the-road phone.
It's not even really about finding the money. Many of us can come up with $700 without any problem. The problem is that we don't want to drop that much money on a top-end phone. We'd rather spend $300 to $400, and get something in the middle. The problem is that we don't find anything like that these days, when in the past we did with the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 phones.
It's dumb to pay $700 or even $1000 for a phone that can be so easily damaged or lost, or worse, become artificially "obsolete" after only 3 years.
Google, give us something like the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 5 were!
The lack of a headphone jack gets all the attention. I think Google left off the headphone jack as a distraction. The real story is that Clips camera. It decides when to take pictures of what is "interesting"? How is that done? Does everything potentially interesting get streamed to the mother ship so that Google's algorithm can determine if it is "interesting" or not? And what exactly is the definition of "interesting"?
Maybe Google has two different "interesting" filters. One that the consumer sees the results of. And one that Google privately keeps the results of.
But not to worry. It's all okay. Google says it's not evil. And you can trust Google to tell you the truth. Because Google is not evil. I know Google is not evil because Google says so. And I can trust Google's statement because Google is not evil.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.