I’m well past the two week return period and I wish I wasn’t. The behind the screen fingerprint sensor is so bad that I disabled it and will now go security free on the lock screen. I’ve grown accustomed to using the fingerprint sensor on the back of my Pixel 3 and going back to a PIN or a swipe pattern is too inconvenient now. Plus, the damn phone is too big to swipe an unlock pattern or enter PINs. For me it requires two hands to accomplish those tasks. When I’m walking through Lowes or Home Depot and need to open my phone to look at my list it is a pain in the ass to use the Pixel 6.
There are some strange software bugs that cropped up as well. A couple times when opening the camera app I get a black screen. I have to force close the camera app to get it to operate correctly again. There were a couple other minor bugs that I can’t remember right now. I wish I wrote them down. But those are the breaks with a non-professional review.
The lock screen clock continues to annoy me because I can’t change it from the giant numbers stacked two by two on top of each other. The home screen continues to annoy me because of that extra unusable space in the upper right-hand corner. I don’t notice anything special with the higher refresh rate screen so I turned that off. I turned off the navigation gestures. They were too inconvenient. Especially when using apps where there are things on the edge of the screen that I need to tap or swipe. The phone regards it as a “go back” swipe and suddenly I’m out of the app I was using. I may look into a non-Pixel launcher so I can get the phone to do what I want.
The only saving grace of the phone is the battery life. I suspect if I was able to replace the battery in my Pixel 3 I would have chosen to do that instead. That phone was perfectly usable with Android 11 providing it had a battery I didn’t have to charge 3 times a day.
This might be the smart phone inflection point for me. I’m at the point of diminishing returns. There is nothing so special about these new phones that justifies the cost. The forced obsolescence through software and glued together devices that are unrepairable is criminal. Maybe the next go around I get a dumb phone and carry a small point and shoot camera instead. It’s not that much more inconvenient than carrying a gigantic slab of glass in my back pocket.