3836

I’ve always been perfectly happy with my Spigen cases.

3837
3838

I like Spigen cases though I don’t get the Rugged Armor ones, but the more minimalist ones. They seem to provide decent protection.

3839

I get the “Rugged Armor” models and they don’t seem to add much bulk IMHO. The “Tough Armor” models seem a little thicker, but it’s hard to tell from the photos. I usually carry my phone in my front pocket so I want it to be as svelte as possible.

3840

Actually, I looked at my order history and I tell a lie: the Pixel 5a w/5G case was a “Rugged Armor” one, and it really does an adequate job without adding a lot of bulk.

3841

Anyone have an S22? Im deciding between that and the Pixel 7. I like the design of the s22 but the battery life seems poor. I like the Pixel launcher on my 3a but it seems like the newer pixels have had issues.

3842

What kind of issues are you thinking of? The 6 had a few UI bugs at launch that were soon fixed. Mine has been rock solid.

3843

At launch, the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro had poor fingerprint unlock performance and a bunch of minor but irritating bugs. The Android 13 release sorted most of the problems, and they finally have the phones where they needed to be at launch. Pretty solid. Hopefully the Pixel 7s will start off in a better place.

I personally value a lot of the stock Android features over Samsung’s implementation.

3844

I have the S22 Plus, so my opinion will not matter much, but battery life is twice as good for me moving from the regular S9.

Freakin’ heavy, though.

3845

I personally found the 6 Pro fingerprint reader fine at launch, but maybe my standards were low since I last tried that feature on a cheap Chinese phone around 5 years ago.

3846

The fingerprint reader was one issue. Some users say it gets hot. My main concern is connectivity. The Pixel 7 still uses a Samsung modem and the 6 had complaints about signal strength. The s22 uses a Qualcomm modem that appears to not have that issue. That plus Samsung not even using their own modem seems like they don’t think highly of it either.

3847

Think in the teardown, they have a much longer antenna in the internals to hopefully get you a better signal.

3848

Wait the Samsung phone doesn’t even use a Samsung antenna? Hahahahaha omg hahahah

3849

I read some more and apparently it’s related to CDMA in the United States. The Samsung modem doesn’t have CDMA. Samsung made an agreement with Qualcomm to pay royalties if they used CDMA in their modem. It’s cheaper just to use Qualcomm in the USA then add CDMA to their worldwide modem.

3850

Yeah, that’s why international Samsungs get the (usually) shittier Exynos SOCs

3851

That is because the Qualcomm are evil patent trolls who lock up ALL the IP needed to make a US compatible cellphone and insist handset makers either use their chips or pay them royalties on every handset.

The US cellphone game is rigged, badly. Other parts of the world that have reasonable and sane telecom regulation don’t have this problem, but in the US the technical standards body for mobile telephony is Qualcomm no matter how much they like to pretend otherwise.

3852

I’m not sure what you mean here. There’s historically non-CDMA US carriers using GSM like T-Mobile, but more importantly everyone has been moving to LTE for over a decade.

3853

The MKBHD Pixel 7 review is out if that helps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE5H5intsck

3854

I just got the pixel 7 pro. I got a crazy good deal on it.

I had bought an s20 5g through the Google store on do back in April, for what was then a very good price of $400. When I bought this pixel 7 pro, they gave me a trade in value of…$400! But bad for a phone that I’ve used for 6 months, to get back 100% of the purchase price.

Plus, they gave me an additional $200 in Google store credit.

So, effectively, I upgraded to the pixel 7 pro for $300.

But it gets better, because while they charged me at first for the phone, it has since disappeared from my credit card transactions… At first I thought maybe they had cancelled the order, but nope, it came today.

This will likely be fixed, but right now as it sits, Google has actually paid me $600 to upgrade to a pixel 7 pro.

First impressions are good. I really missed the pixel experience. The Samsung came close to emulating it, after I figured out how to turn all the Samsung stuff off, but not quite. I look forward to not having the phone every accidentally open up the Samsung wallet again… No Samsung, I do not want to use your wallet, ever.

The phone is really huge, which I like. Almost mini tablet size. One of my favorite devices ever was my old Nexus 7 tablet. The 7 inch tablet was just a great form factor that seems abandoned…I guess I was the only one who liked it. But with a 6.7 inch screen, this is pretty much the same thing, with much less bezel.

One thing that is interesting, is that the autocorrect seems better… Perhaps an artifact of the g2 tensor chip? Too early to tell, but it would be interesting and sad if my autocorrect suddenly stopped making absurd suggestions.

3855

Hey, I bought that phone for my wife for $400 from the google fi store. About 1.5 years ago I believe.
They’re really giving $400 in trade-in for it, and an additional $200?