The next day, I went back to the woods and found my Pixel, still inside the faraday bag. The erase order hadn't gotten to the phone. It still hasn't. That's right: to this day, I've kept the phone in that bag, waiting and praying for some way to reverse the wipe command I gave to Google. One day, Google will enable me to reverse that wipe order, I have faith.
Then simply let it erase itself and reinitialize it from backup.
I like the idea of going into the woods -- how do I get ALL the data off the phone in a human-readable manner that's accessible to someone like me -- not a sophisticated computer nerd, but someone who dabbles in python, can do rudimentary stuff with the command line, and would be lost without Windows? I can obviously grab the photos. But can I recover anything else? The filetypes will all make the data sticky to the apps, wouldnt it?
I wanted to consider GrapheneOS, but I’m not sending my perfectly capable, lithium-battery-less, doesn’t-need-firmeware-update IEMs to convert to earbuds Google happens to sell branded and bundled to replace the port they dropped (just one model after teasing competing brands with their 5a).
However, if you could get iOS on hardware from different manufacturers, loyalty to Apple for hardware would inevitably be lessened. If that was the case, I would consider an iOS device in some capacity.
Samsung is the dominant Android player, for a variety of reasons. Pixel and OnePlus (and Samsung and Apple) make a lot of extra money by charging $100/$200 to boost from 128gb to 256 or 512 but that strategy doesn't differentiate them and definitely doesn't make Samsung loyalists switch.
You cannot state that adding an SD slot wouldn't improve market share, because there are no premium competitors who do, the hypothesis is untested.
So I went on Amazon, bought a new battery for $18 including tools, and installed it as a first timer in 20 minutes. Works great.
Not every consumer is able to do that. So Google just burns them.
The tiny plastic clip that attaches to the motherboard is brittle and breaks when the ribbon pulls on it as the phone flexs and moves around.
So I used some of the sticky tape provided to hold the battery down, to hold down the connector. So now when the ribbon pulls on the head of the connector, it has to overcome the tape before it can flex the connector and crack it. 9 months later no failure yet so it's too early to know, but I'd bet good money that adding a viscous gluey tape over a connector that was breaking due to flexing around would help keep it together longer. Why couldn't Google do that the first two times they wasted money installing a new battery?
Forget about challenging Apple...the Pixel line barely competes with Samsung. There is no way this is a win for Google, and its long past time they gave it up.
Quality and software issues (from Google!) plague these phones. Even now, there is a trending story of an update that is causing phones to get hot...and this is from Google who controls the software, hardware, deployment...
And then there is the pure junk like the Pixel Watch and the upcoming tablet...inferior products that should never have been brought to market. Were even 100k Pixel Watches sold?
I was loyal until my Pixel 3 swelled to the point I was concerned it would catch fire
After that, back to Samsung...no problems since
Even if the Pixel phones were great products...they don't sell in volume. Time for Google to accept that Samsung runs the Android market.
That saying about premature scaling "You're not Google." seems to apply to design execution as well "Google, you're not Apple."
