Preliminary battery life results. Using the stock OS. No issues with apps so far, apart from Lawnchair’s back animation being a bit more broken with some apps than on my Pixel.
Yeah I have to agree, the financial cost is tiny. The physical packaging cost is high. If you see how dense modern devices are, and how much space modern cameras take, you can see what the cost of taking the equivalent space of a 3.5mm jack is. Ingress is an additional valid engineering problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind devices that are a few mm thicker and therefore have less packaging constraints for jacks, bigger batteries, etc.
Good question.
There was an announcement about QC extending SD 7 and 8 support for up to 8 years but they say it depends on the OEM. Maybe FP is part of that deal. Maybe not.
Now let’s look at the Pixel’s update support from another angle. The problem I see is that the hardware may not last that long in practice. Specifically due to the lack of parts or the prices for those parts. For example a replacement for my Pixel 8 Pro’s battery is currently CAD $160. That used to be $80 when I had a Pixel 5. The screen repair cost is very high. Over the year-and-a-half I’ve had it, its battery capacity has gone down to 92%. A battery I have almost never fast charged. If this degradation rate continues, it’ll need replacement by year 2-3 of the device life. That’ll be $160-200 for another 2-3 years. Then there’s the parts availability. The Pixel 6a, supported to 2027, has a fire-hazardous battery defect requiring battery replacement. Our extended family has a couple. We checked with the authorized repair shops and it turns out they no longer have those batteries. That’s 3 years into the device’s support lifespan. This means it’s quite plausibe that I won’t be able to replace my Pixel 8 Pro’s battery next year, let alone in the 6th year of its 7-year support lifespan. In other words that long of an update support is only meaningful if it’s supplanted by the necessary availability of parts, and ideally the ability to replace them without specialized tools. I’ve tried replacing a Pixel battery in the past and I broke a screen. I’m sure I can get the hang of it if I had the requisite hot plates, high end suction cups and a few spare devices to practice, but that’s not practical for most users.
Got it. Yeah it makes sense for the warranty. I assumed I could get parts in Canada though. I might have jumped the gun on this one. I thought iFixit sells them and they do but I can see their site says “Not sold in Canads” for a few parts I checked just now. Hmm.
E: It seems that Clove also sells parts. I see some FP4 and 5 parts. No FP6 parts yet.
In a Qudelix 5K. Ever since phones got really thin and their jacks too fragile for heavy headphone plugs and cables like the ones on MDR-7506/ATH-M50 (mid 2010s), I embarked on a journey into high quality Bluetooth audio receivers. For many years now FiiO has made way better Bt amps than what’s available in most smartphones, even when most had headphone jacks. The Qudelix 5K is one of the best small format amps these days. On the wireless side, LDAC and AptX have eliminated Bt bandwidth as significant quality constraint. That said talking over such a setup has always been some form of bad.
It lacks LTE band 13. Reply to some of my comments in a few weeks time and I’ll see the notifucation and update with some real world testing. If money is a problem, don’t spend it on this. Get a second hand Pixel 7/8/9 when yours dies and use that as they can be found relatively cheap. The a-series are even cheaper but you have to watch for battery issues. The Pixel can still be locked down fairly well with the stock OS by disabling various apps and components, and by throwing anything you don’t trust in Private Space.
Buddy, I’m in Torontario guy. Bought from Clove UK for 1016 Canadian peso final-final, after DHL blood sacrifice.
Freedom. The only band it lacks for their Torontario network is band 13. I decided to risk it because Freedom used to run the network without band 13 until a few years ago. So I reason the coverage without it should be similar to the before time. That means a bit of a downgrade in signal and probably battery, given that band 13 is lower power, longer range fequency. But then again the FP’s modem is Qualcomm so it may end up being more power efficient than the turd in my Pixel. So I decided to try it out.
Another full charge session clocks at 96%.