Have they shipped yours yet? When I ordered mine, there was a charge to the card - but it went away after a day or two. Then, the day before it actually shipped, the charge came back (and stuck, this time).
I can let you know in a few days. I have been using OLED phones for 8 years, and never once had a concern or problem with the display tech / quality. My Pixel 2 XL arrives on Thursday, so by next week sometime I should be able to answer the question of if / when the 2 XL's screen is not up to snuff.
Could you enlighten us as to how best to check? I've seen folks using a solid grey image on the Pixel 2 XL to try and see burn-in, but does it need to be a particular shade of grey? Or are there other, better ways to check?
Ouch, this is the sort of direct comparison I was worried about. I have - and love! - a Nexus 6. I would keep it till it dies, except the front camera stopped working a few months ago and it sometimes acts up in other ways. If someone make a clone of the Nexus 6 with just a faster CPU and more storage, I'd go for it in a heartbeat. The screen is amazing, even after 2.5 years!
I'm in the same boat as you, with a Pixel 2 arriving this week... and two weeks to decide if I keep it. Crossing my fingers that we both get lucky and have screens on the better end of the spectrum (if such a thing exists in this case).
A recall would be pretty extreme, and unlikely, I agree (though I would love to be mistaken!)
I am going to give a shot to using the 2 XL for a few days, though, and will see how the screen's shortcomings impact my usage. If I am not bothered, I'll stick with it. if it does start to get to me, it will be headed back for a refund.
I've own 4 OLED phones now (Samsung Moment, Galaxy Nexus, Moto X, Nexus 6) over 8 years. None of them had burn-in issues that I ever saw / experienced, and they all had decent off-angle color accuracy as well (better than LCD phone screens of the same time periods).
I have heard that Samsung uses pixel shifting on some of their newer phones, but if they did that on any of the models I have owned I never noticed. If the 2 XL's screen is anywhere near the quality of the ones I've had on other phones, I will be just fine... but the raft of bad press is not a good sign.
Of course tech keeps getting tweaked and advanced, but I've own 4 OLED phones now (Samsung Moment, Galaxy Nexus, Moto X, Nexus 6) over 8 years. None of them had burn-in issues that I ever saw / experienced, and they all had decent off-angle color accuracy as well (far better than LCD screens of the same time periods). It seems that the issue with the 2 XL is that the screen is made by LG, who have far less experience and engineering in the OLED phone market compared to Samsung. Maybe they went with a LG screen because LG was making the rest of the phone? Or maybe Samsung couldn't provide the size and resolution they wanted, at the right quantity / price? I don't know for sure, but whatever the reason it seems to be biting Google that they didn't go with the best OLED screen manufacturer. I *hope* to be proven wrong when mine comes in (on the 26th - I am both excited and worried) but the raft of bad press is definitely not a good sign.
I abhor Apple as a company, and will never own any of their products. Its a philosophical difference, mostly stemming from their approach to computer hardware and software. They do make good quality hardware, including phones, and for those who like Apple (or don't care about one company vs another) I think the iPhones can be great options.
And I know that there is plenty to dislike about Google these days as well. That is a bit unfortunate, that they haven't really stuck with their Do No Evil motto (a good ideal, if one could achieve it). Maybe someday I will loathe them as much as Apple, but for now I am strictly an Android user. I'm also pretty heavily invested in the app ecosystem, making a move to a different OS more expensive as well (buying all the apps over again).
I haven't owned a normal LCD phone in... gosh, almost a decade now? But my wife has had them up until her current Galaxy S7, and on her previous phones with the same app (Kindle) and brightness at minimum it was glaringly unpleasant to read with the lights off. I could give it a shot again, I suppose:)
I was really excited about the Essential when I first heard of it, but it has a normal (non-OLED) screen. That is a no-go for me, as I spend 30+ minutes every night reading in the dark just before bed. The difference between a backlight that is trying to be blocked by LCD versus a pure black with only the text lighting up at all is huge. I would be willing to live with the lack of stereo front speakers and the weird camera cut-out on the screen if the screen type itself was right, as the other specs are all fantastic and I like their philosophy / approach.
Maybe... maybe if the 2 XL doesn't work out, I'll go look at an Essential in person. Who knows - perhaps the backlight can go dim enough for me to be okay with it? Would be hard to tell for sure in a brightly lit store, though:/
So I reached out to Google last week, to make sure that I could return the Pixel 2 XL for a full refund should I not be satisfied with the screen. They confirmed (via live chat) that there is a 15-day 'buyers regret' window for a full refund, so I am trusting them on that. My phone should arrive later this week, and I am hoping that the issues people have raised are overblown... but if not, I'll send it right back and get something else instead.
I really want to like it, though, because aside from the screen quality the specs are as close to my ideal setup as anything else that exists right now:
- OLED (I prefer Samsung's AMOLED, personally, but I absolutely hate normal LCD / IPS panels on phones because of my need for perfectly black backgrounds when reading at low light levels)
- 6" screen (I'd settle for 5.5 in a pinch, but I watch a lot of videos and find a large screen very pleasant)
- 4GB RAM (more would be fine too)
- Dual front-facing speakers (again, related to watching a lot of video content without headphones)
- Stock (or near-stock) Android
- Good cameras
- Support for Sprint (my carrier)
- Good battery life
It is missing wireless charging, which I would like, but I can live without it. I also don't care about the missing headphone jack, which a lot of people are upset over, since the only headphones I bother to use are Bluetooth (and I rarely use them anyway).
Oh, was the author concerned with the degree to which the link was different from the rest of the text? I didn't notice that, as it seemed like their emphasis was more on the presence of links in the text at all. For example, they wrote "Every link stops you in your tracks and forces you to make a choice—keep reading, or move on?"
I personally don't find links to cause that dilemma. I treat them instead as the digital equivalent of footnotes: I read right past them, but if I want to come back later and get more info or check out the author's sources then I will go back and follow the links at my convenience.
I was speaking subjectively. In my experience, as long as the text of the link is similar enough in color to the rest of the text then I can read right through it without distraction. In fact, I often don't even notice links the first time through - even if they are underlined - and have to go back afterward and look for them (if I want to dig further).
No, I haven't been tested to see if this subjective perception is accurate... but if there was a big enough distraction or delay in processing the link text then I think I would notice - and likely be bothered, as the author of the article seemed to be (going from the/. summary).
I guess what I am saying is that, personally, having some visible form of emphasis on words to denote a link is not a problem for me - so long as the distinction is not so extreme, particularly in regards to color choice of the text itself. Underlines don't bother me.
Being able to see what source a writer is pulling from is a good first step in fact checking something. If the link goes to a sketchy site - somewhere known for heavily biased content, for example - then you can get an idea of the likelihood that the information is true and un-skewed. If it is a site you aren't familiar with, you could begin to research the reputation of the site, or follow further links to additional sources. It is not sufficient alone, and there are other ways to go about fact checking as well, but being able to follow link trails is extremely helpful in my experience.
Am I alone in this? As long as the color of the link isn't overly distracting - darker shades of green, blue, grey, etc work well if the text itself is black - then I am fine with it.
I wonder if it is just a problem for folks who aren't accustomed to this sort of reading, perhaps because they were already well into adulthood before online articles with links became prevalent? I'm no spring chicken, and grew up reading books and magazines, but I don't have a problem with this.
Moreover, I'd prefer to have plenty of links rather than have whole articles where you cannot follow the sources or fact-check easily!
I will say that sometimes links in text are annoying on mobile browsers, but that has more to do with the risk of clicking a link when trying to scroll than anything else. I do prefer when the default behavior of a link is to open in a new tab, so I don't lose my place in the original page, but that can be manually controlled if necessary.
Ads in-line with articles are a much bigger complaint for me, personally, and much more distracting when trying to read (and again, they are usually worse on mobile).
Sure, you could keep your master copies on a home network and open ports for remote access... but even more easily you could use Google Drive, and not have to worry about potentially opening holes in your home network. Then, use Google Drive's various platform apps to keep local backups of the data on your Drive - and keep an additional periodic backup externally, so that if you accidentally change or delete something that propagates to the various local versions of Drive you can still go back and get an older copy.
That is what I do, at least, and it has kept my data both easily accessible and secure. I also encrypt the sensitive stuff on my own before it gets put on Google Drive.
Why not do both? Then if your external drive dies, or you are not at home / the office with it, or whatever... you have multiple copies of your data in multiple physical locations. That is how it should be done:)
We have relatives who live in the path of totality, so we drove from Seattle out to Wyoming and stayed with them. From their yard we watched the total eclipse, and I recorded it two ways:
I shop at Amazon quite a lot, but I don't think I've ever used the 1-click checkout. I always want to double-check the payment method I am using (I have several, depending on what I am getting and what it is for) and where it is shipping (home, work, a gift to someone, etc).
For other Amazon customers, do you find this feature to actually be something you use? And have you ever not shopped at another online store (or chosen to shop at Amazon instead) specifically because of this? I am genuinely curious.
Already checked the article, and it does not appear to say or link to a list of them. That sort of info would be quite helpful, as a major step toward solving this sort of thing *without needing the government / laws* is to publicize when companies are doing the wrong thing with our data so that people who care about it can stop using them.
Just do it as much as you can. If you need something, check to see if anyone makes it in the US. Then, if not the US look for other first-world countries (where living and environmental standards should be decent). If not, look for anywhere *but* China. Only buy stuff made in China if that is truly the only option.
I try to do this as much as possible, though a number of things I buy (especially tech stuff) are still only made in China.
Those ARM chips only cost a fraction of the AMD and Intel processors, though, and in any sort of real computation are only a fraction of the speed as well (and power consumption, to be fair). Intel and AMD should stick to the big, powerful, and expensive chips.
Moreover, there are plenty of single-threaded workloads. Most modeling applications, for example. True, you wouldn't really want a single core processor - but you are far better off with a 4 core at high clock speed than an 8, 12, or 16 core. It will both cost less and actually perform faster, thanks to better clock speeds.
These AMD 12-16 core chips will have their place, no doubt, as do ARM processors... but it really is important to pick the right processor for your workload. There is no single best processor for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Have they shipped yours yet? When I ordered mine, there was a charge to the card - but it went away after a day or two. Then, the day before it actually shipped, the charge came back (and stuck, this time).
I can let you know in a few days. I have been using OLED phones for 8 years, and never once had a concern or problem with the display tech / quality. My Pixel 2 XL arrives on Thursday, so by next week sometime I should be able to answer the question of if / when the 2 XL's screen is not up to snuff.
Could you enlighten us as to how best to check? I've seen folks using a solid grey image on the Pixel 2 XL to try and see burn-in, but does it need to be a particular shade of grey? Or are there other, better ways to check?
Ouch, this is the sort of direct comparison I was worried about. I have - and love! - a Nexus 6. I would keep it till it dies, except the front camera stopped working a few months ago and it sometimes acts up in other ways. If someone make a clone of the Nexus 6 with just a faster CPU and more storage, I'd go for it in a heartbeat. The screen is amazing, even after 2.5 years!
I'm in the same boat as you, with a Pixel 2 arriving this week... and two weeks to decide if I keep it. Crossing my fingers that we both get lucky and have screens on the better end of the spectrum (if such a thing exists in this case).
A recall would be pretty extreme, and unlikely, I agree (though I would love to be mistaken!)
I am going to give a shot to using the 2 XL for a few days, though, and will see how the screen's shortcomings impact my usage. If I am not bothered, I'll stick with it. if it does start to get to me, it will be headed back for a refund.
I've own 4 OLED phones now (Samsung Moment, Galaxy Nexus, Moto X, Nexus 6) over 8 years. None of them had burn-in issues that I ever saw / experienced, and they all had decent off-angle color accuracy as well (better than LCD phone screens of the same time periods).
I have heard that Samsung uses pixel shifting on some of their newer phones, but if they did that on any of the models I have owned I never noticed. If the 2 XL's screen is anywhere near the quality of the ones I've had on other phones, I will be just fine... but the raft of bad press is not a good sign.
Of course tech keeps getting tweaked and advanced, but I've own 4 OLED phones now (Samsung Moment, Galaxy Nexus, Moto X, Nexus 6) over 8 years. None of them had burn-in issues that I ever saw / experienced, and they all had decent off-angle color accuracy as well (far better than LCD screens of the same time periods). It seems that the issue with the 2 XL is that the screen is made by LG, who have far less experience and engineering in the OLED phone market compared to Samsung. Maybe they went with a LG screen because LG was making the rest of the phone? Or maybe Samsung couldn't provide the size and resolution they wanted, at the right quantity / price? I don't know for sure, but whatever the reason it seems to be biting Google that they didn't go with the best OLED screen manufacturer. I *hope* to be proven wrong when mine comes in (on the 26th - I am both excited and worried) but the raft of bad press is definitely not a good sign.
I abhor Apple as a company, and will never own any of their products. Its a philosophical difference, mostly stemming from their approach to computer hardware and software. They do make good quality hardware, including phones, and for those who like Apple (or don't care about one company vs another) I think the iPhones can be great options.
And I know that there is plenty to dislike about Google these days as well. That is a bit unfortunate, that they haven't really stuck with their Do No Evil motto (a good ideal, if one could achieve it). Maybe someday I will loathe them as much as Apple, but for now I am strictly an Android user. I'm also pretty heavily invested in the app ecosystem, making a move to a different OS more expensive as well (buying all the apps over again).
I haven't owned a normal LCD phone in... gosh, almost a decade now? But my wife has had them up until her current Galaxy S7, and on her previous phones with the same app (Kindle) and brightness at minimum it was glaringly unpleasant to read with the lights off. I could give it a shot again, I suppose :)
I was really excited about the Essential when I first heard of it, but it has a normal (non-OLED) screen. That is a no-go for me, as I spend 30+ minutes every night reading in the dark just before bed. The difference between a backlight that is trying to be blocked by LCD versus a pure black with only the text lighting up at all is huge. I would be willing to live with the lack of stereo front speakers and the weird camera cut-out on the screen if the screen type itself was right, as the other specs are all fantastic and I like their philosophy / approach.
Maybe... maybe if the 2 XL doesn't work out, I'll go look at an Essential in person. Who knows - perhaps the backlight can go dim enough for me to be okay with it? Would be hard to tell for sure in a brightly lit store, though :/
So I reached out to Google last week, to make sure that I could return the Pixel 2 XL for a full refund should I not be satisfied with the screen. They confirmed (via live chat) that there is a 15-day 'buyers regret' window for a full refund, so I am trusting them on that. My phone should arrive later this week, and I am hoping that the issues people have raised are overblown... but if not, I'll send it right back and get something else instead.
I really want to like it, though, because aside from the screen quality the specs are as close to my ideal setup as anything else that exists right now:
- OLED (I prefer Samsung's AMOLED, personally, but I absolutely hate normal LCD / IPS panels on phones because of my need for perfectly black backgrounds when reading at low light levels)
- 6" screen (I'd settle for 5.5 in a pinch, but I watch a lot of videos and find a large screen very pleasant)
- 4GB RAM (more would be fine too)
- Dual front-facing speakers (again, related to watching a lot of video content without headphones)
- Stock (or near-stock) Android
- Good cameras
- Support for Sprint (my carrier)
- Good battery life
It is missing wireless charging, which I would like, but I can live without it. I also don't care about the missing headphone jack, which a lot of people are upset over, since the only headphones I bother to use are Bluetooth (and I rarely use them anyway).
Oh, was the author concerned with the degree to which the link was different from the rest of the text? I didn't notice that, as it seemed like their emphasis was more on the presence of links in the text at all. For example, they wrote "Every link stops you in your tracks and forces you to make a choice—keep reading, or move on?"
I personally don't find links to cause that dilemma. I treat them instead as the digital equivalent of footnotes: I read right past them, but if I want to come back later and get more info or check out the author's sources then I will go back and follow the links at my convenience.
I was speaking subjectively. In my experience, as long as the text of the link is similar enough in color to the rest of the text then I can read right through it without distraction. In fact, I often don't even notice links the first time through - even if they are underlined - and have to go back afterward and look for them (if I want to dig further).
No, I haven't been tested to see if this subjective perception is accurate... but if there was a big enough distraction or delay in processing the link text then I think I would notice - and likely be bothered, as the author of the article seemed to be (going from the /. summary).
I guess what I am saying is that, personally, having some visible form of emphasis on words to denote a link is not a problem for me - so long as the distinction is not so extreme, particularly in regards to color choice of the text itself. Underlines don't bother me.
Being able to see what source a writer is pulling from is a good first step in fact checking something. If the link goes to a sketchy site - somewhere known for heavily biased content, for example - then you can get an idea of the likelihood that the information is true and un-skewed. If it is a site you aren't familiar with, you could begin to research the reputation of the site, or follow further links to additional sources. It is not sufficient alone, and there are other ways to go about fact checking as well, but being able to follow link trails is extremely helpful in my experience.
Am I alone in this? As long as the color of the link isn't overly distracting - darker shades of green, blue, grey, etc work well if the text itself is black - then I am fine with it.
I wonder if it is just a problem for folks who aren't accustomed to this sort of reading, perhaps because they were already well into adulthood before online articles with links became prevalent? I'm no spring chicken, and grew up reading books and magazines, but I don't have a problem with this.
Moreover, I'd prefer to have plenty of links rather than have whole articles where you cannot follow the sources or fact-check easily!
I will say that sometimes links in text are annoying on mobile browsers, but that has more to do with the risk of clicking a link when trying to scroll than anything else. I do prefer when the default behavior of a link is to open in a new tab, so I don't lose my place in the original page, but that can be manually controlled if necessary.
Ads in-line with articles are a much bigger complaint for me, personally, and much more distracting when trying to read (and again, they are usually worse on mobile).
Sure, you could keep your master copies on a home network and open ports for remote access... but even more easily you could use Google Drive, and not have to worry about potentially opening holes in your home network. Then, use Google Drive's various platform apps to keep local backups of the data on your Drive - and keep an additional periodic backup externally, so that if you accidentally change or delete something that propagates to the various local versions of Drive you can still go back and get an older copy.
That is what I do, at least, and it has kept my data both easily accessible and secure. I also encrypt the sensitive stuff on my own before it gets put on Google Drive.
Anything that is sensitive should be encrypted first, of course. Depends on what you are storing.
Why not do both? Then if your external drive dies, or you are not at home / the office with it, or whatever... you have multiple copies of your data in multiple physical locations. That is how it should be done :)
We have relatives who live in the path of totality, so we drove from Seattle out to Wyoming and stayed with them. From their yard we watched the total eclipse, and I recorded it two ways:
1080P Close-up: https://youtu.be/LD0sAIavU-A
360 Video: https://youtu.be/ZyymEkOblGM
I think I could get by with that these days, though I'd prefer to have one. The deal killer for me is the use of a screen that is not OLED.
I shop at Amazon quite a lot, but I don't think I've ever used the 1-click checkout. I always want to double-check the payment method I am using (I have several, depending on what I am getting and what it is for) and where it is shipping (home, work, a gift to someone, etc).
For other Amazon customers, do you find this feature to actually be something you use? And have you ever not shopped at another online store (or chosen to shop at Amazon instead) specifically because of this? I am genuinely curious.
Interesting - uBlock.org or uBlock Origin? They appear to be different.
I dislike when competing things have such similar names, and something similar happened with AdBlock and Adblock Plus as well.
Already checked the article, and it does not appear to say or link to a list of them. That sort of info would be quite helpful, as a major step toward solving this sort of thing *without needing the government / laws* is to publicize when companies are doing the wrong thing with our data so that people who care about it can stop using them.
Just do it as much as you can. If you need something, check to see if anyone makes it in the US. Then, if not the US look for other first-world countries (where living and environmental standards should be decent). If not, look for anywhere *but* China. Only buy stuff made in China if that is truly the only option.
I try to do this as much as possible, though a number of things I buy (especially tech stuff) are still only made in China.
Those ARM chips only cost a fraction of the AMD and Intel processors, though, and in any sort of real computation are only a fraction of the speed as well (and power consumption, to be fair). Intel and AMD should stick to the big, powerful, and expensive chips.
Moreover, there are plenty of single-threaded workloads. Most modeling applications, for example. True, you wouldn't really want a single core processor - but you are far better off with a 4 core at high clock speed than an 8, 12, or 16 core. It will both cost less and actually perform faster, thanks to better clock speeds.
These AMD 12-16 core chips will have their place, no doubt, as do ARM processors... but it really is important to pick the right processor for your workload. There is no single best processor for everything.