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My week with the Pixel 3 XL

Never let a bunch of people decide anything that you have to do via a Twitter poll. In my case, very definitely don’t let them condemn you to a week-long trial of any product other than the ones you favour. That’s how I ended up spending a week or so using the Google Pixel 3 XL rather than my beloved iPhone XS Max. My Apple Watch sat on the sidelines and in its place on my wrist came a Fossil Sport watch running Wear OS. I gave it a shot. But how did it actually do? And did I end up tearing my hair out?

What's better

I’m going to leave the camera to one side for a while, but there are a few areas where the Pixel 3 XL is a clear winner.

Top of the list: Google Assistant. Although there are a couple of ways that Assistant is worse than Siri, by and large it’s a huge step upwards. Even though it still hasn’t got totally to grips with my accent (no, Google, “hole” does not mean the same thing as “hall”. I do not have any lights in my hole) Assistant’s ability to answer queries and generally get things done is outstanding.

What did I miss?

There were quite a few things though which made me constantly want to run back to iPhone. Mostly, they were small, but when you start to add up the small things, they matter.

First, there was FaceID. Once you’ve got used to just glancing at your phone and opening it up instantly, going back to having to press your finger on a fingerprint reader makes you feel like you have gone back to some kind of technological dark age.

Next there’s Siri. Now I know that I said Google Assistant was way ahead — and it is — but there’s one area that Siri still stands head and shoulders above its Google rival, and that’s home automation. Even after all this time, Google Assistant does not understand that homes have different regions where you might want to turn off and on a bunch of lights: or, as we sometimes call them, “upstairs and downstairs”.

Apps, too, are still behind. There are plenty of streak trackers, but none as good as Streaks. There are plenty of task lists, but none as good as either OmniFocus or Things. Google Fit is fine, but as a hub for all your health information, it’s laughable compared to Apple Health and as a fitness app it’s not as good as Fitness.

Then there’s the hardware and software eco-system and how everything just works together. You would think this might be an area where Google could lead, but instead it lags. Android and Chrome OS still feel like strangers sitting next to each other on a train, rather than a couple.

Then there’s Apple Watch: boy, did I miss Apple Watch. Although I used a pretty decent recent wear OS device (the Fossil Sport), it’s pretty laughable as a wearable. Design-wise, the hardware is fine: this, after all, is a company that knows how to make good looking objects for your wrist. But the software and speed of the device itself are probably compatible to a first generation Apple Watch. Google Assistant, which should be a star on the wrist, is a laggy joke. And the lack of decent applications makes it pretty useless on the whole.

That camera

Of course, there’s one thing that I really haven’t touched on much here: the camera. The Pixel 3 series is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, camera on a smartphone at the moment. Google achieves this not through hardware – although there’s certainly nothing back about the 12 megapixel rear-facing camera – but through its “computational photography”, machine learning algorithms which use multiple shots, the shake of your hand, and other features to improve every single image.

And it is a really good camera, capable of producing consistently excellent images across a huge range of lighting conditions. You just won’t get many duff shots out of the Pixel 3.

However, what you are not getting is anything close to images that are true to life, and every now and then the computational photography approach just completely messes up. Portrait mode, for example, will do wacky things like blur out the frame of someone’s glasses rather than correctly interpreting them as part of the face. Occasionally, the Pixel’s desire to make colours pop out at every opportunity also betrays it. For example, taking a wide picture of a kitchen while a friend was cooking, the Pixel decided that because they were wearing a yellow sweater, it should also add a pale yellow tinge to their face. Perhaps that algorithm needs to learn that “jaundiced” isn’t a natural human skin tone.

Portrait mode is also an interesting area. When the iPhone XS Max first came out, Apple’s algorithms for portrait mode over-smoothed skin to a crazy degree. Apple has tweaked these since, and now it’s the Pixel 3’s face smoothing looks over done. It’s not bad: but as soon as you look closely at an image, it’s pretty obvious what the Pixel is trying to do.

Then there’s Night Sight. This is widely – and rightly – regarded as something of a miracle. Even outside, on a pretty dark night with little illumination to work with I can get a clear shot of what’s going on in the garden. But it’s also weird looking, like Jeff Brouws work, and looks absolutely nothing like what you’re seeing in front of you.

There’s no optical zoom on the Pixel 3. And amazingly, you will very rarely care, because Google has done an absolutely amazing job of creating a digital zoom that’s almost as good as having a second lens. Almost – but not quite. This is an area where optics will always beat computation, but unless you’re constantly using zoom, the digital zoom on the Pixel will make you very happy indeed. Good job, Google.

At the end of the day, you are not going to go wrong with either of these cameras. Is the camera better than the iPhone XS Max? It depends on what kinds of images you prefer. Do you want something that looks more or less like what you’re seeing in front of you? The iPhone is your better option. Do you want something that’s “better” in the sense of brighter, more energetic and with lighting that looks bright but not over-lit? The Pixel is probably the camera for you. The colours you end up with on screen will look great – but they will be nothing like the colours that your eye will have seen at the time.

What next?

So am I going to stick with the Pixel? Nope. I’m too embedded in the Apple hardware ecosystem and too much in love with Apple Watch to make that leap for too long. But I am going to spend some more time with it, and in particular I’m going to spend some time with Android Q.

Android Q’s third developer beta just came out, and for a bit of fun I decided to install it – and I very much like what I’ve seen so far. The gesture interface (which is so copied from iOS) is more consistent and coherent than the current version, and I like the dark mode even if – as yet – not many applications support it.

Now you’ll have to excuse me, as I have some SIM swapping to do…

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The Pixel 3 XL experiment

Here's a lesson for you: never, ever ask your Twitter followers whether or not you should use a particular kind of hardware or software. Ever more so, never allow them a Twitter poll vote on whether you should do something or not.

Last week, I did this:

[twitter.com/ianbetter...](https://twitter.com/ianbetteridge/status/1120355060372910080)
Don't do this. Ever.

For the next week, starting from today, I'll be forsaking my beloved iPhone XS Max in favour of the Pixel 3 XL. Perhaps more painfully, I'll also be putting my Apple Watch on to charge and leaving it there, with a Fossil Sport WearOS smartwatch taking its place.
Next Sunday, I'll write up what I think about it. I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I know that there are some aspects of the Pixel that I like already (the camera).

This is all your fault, Twitter followers.

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Learning to love silence

I’ve always been someone who has background noise around them. Growing up, the TV was always on, and my dad spent his time singing around the house – he couldn’t hear a silence without filling it with a song. My mum said that she knew my dad was seriously ill when he stopped singing.

I’ve been the same. Get home, turn the TV on, or – more recently – turn the radio on. When I lived in houses where the TV wasn’t the centre of the world, or I didn’t have one (strange to think I’ve lived in places with no TV!) then I would sing, or listen to music. I swam in noise.

Silence was a stranger.

And deeper than that, silence made me feel lonely. I used to listen to the radio late at night, while going to sleep, because the soft background hubbub of quiet voices made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world. Noise, and especially talking, showed me the world was still alive, that things were still as they should be.

Since starting to meditate regularly I’ve become much more comfortable with silence. I still lapse into singing, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but the ongoing song in my head in no longer automatically there. I can be silent inside, and sometimes just appreciate silence around me – as I am now, with no one else in the house, the cat fed (so not filling my ears with her “starved” little voice) and nothing on. No radio, no TV, no music. Just me and the sounds of my fingers clacking across the keyboard. There’s a certain comfort in that, too.

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You've got to know when to fold 'em

Lots to agree with in Owen Williams piece on “Foldable phones: right tech, wrong place?”, starting with this:

If I consider it for a while, the largest advantage would be to merge the tablet category with the phone, but it's a confusing proposal: do consumers desire a phone and tablet that will require charging even more often? Perhaps foldables are like adding a second monitor to your desktop: useful for power users to get a bit more space, but most people don't care.
There's two other problems with foldable phones of the kind we're seeing at the moment. First, when unfolded they are too wide to thumb type on, but too narrow to have a meaningful keyboard. Second, the most popular size of tablet is around 10-11in: halve that and you have a very wide or very narrow phone, depending on which axis you put the fold.
Foldables actually make more sense applied to larger devices, such as the iPad Pro or something more complex along the lines of the Surface Book. While I never really wished my phone was a tablet, I've certainly mulled the idea of a tablet and laptop combined, adaptable to the situation I'm in, without the awkward detached keyboard kicking around somewhere.

Surface Book, for example, could simply be a single ultra-thin device that folds into itself to become a slate, rather than detaching. The lower half, in ‘laptop’ mode could transform into a simple display-based keyboard, and adapt dynamically to the form-factor it finds itself in at any moment.

I’m not sure about this. Part of the advantage of tablet form devices is that you don’t have to have the additional weight and bulk of the keyboard. Surface Book works because if you take off the base, it weighs less than half as much, making it easy to use when held. Surface Pro and iPad Pro work because you can remove the keyboard altogether and still have a usable slate.

In theory I would love an iPad Pro that folded in half to reduce its size. In practice, that would more than double the thickness once you account for the inevitable hinge mechanism. Folding devices are just bulky devices, and who wants that?

Most of the tech news sites are going absolutely crazy over folding devices. I just don’t think they have any kind of use case yet. Perhaps they’ll find one, but I can think of a million technologies in the past which never made it past this stage.

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Becoming a creator

OK, this sounds trite. But…

The difference between you and the creators you follow is simply they are creating while you are consuming.
Source: 13 tips for making the switch from a consumer to a creator | Nathan Barry

You can’t create more than you consume. Consumption is quicker and easier by definition – it takes far longer to write a novel than for even the slowest reader to consume it. The key question is how much time you’ve investing in each.

Nathan’s tips are well worth reading. I think my favourite is this:

Decide what you are going to do before you sit down at the computer — Too often I sit down at my computer and think, what should I work on? That’s dangerous. It usually starts with checking social media, reading slack, and catching up on email. The trick is to decide what you are going to do before you approach the computer.
In other words – and this is something I come back a lot at the moment – be intentional about what you're doing. If you're just sitting there with a device playing around with it, you're not doing anything that's actually of value. Know what you're going to do before you do it. Be intentional.
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Remembering Project Marklar

Nick Wingfield mentioned something which took me back a long way:

It's well worth reading the whole thread, as much of it typifies Steve Jobs, but describing the reporting of Nick dePlume and Matthew Rothenberg at eWeek on Project Marklar as "rumours" is wrong. In 2002, they absolutely nailed the details of the nascent Intel project. I know the work that went into that story, because I talked them about it at the time.

I was tangentially involved in it. At the time, I was news editor on MacUser UK, and a year before they broke the story, Nick called me to see if I’d heard anything about Transitive, the UK-based company whose PowerPC to Intel code translation software Apple was using.

Nick and Matthew worked on that story for a good 18 months before publishing anything. It was solid, dogged reporting. Calling it “rumours” is what Apple did at the time - basically, anything Apple didn’t want you to report, they called “rumours”.

Worth remembering: Jobs was so pissed off about the Marklar story (and many others) that he made closing dePlume’s site a priority - and eventually sued it out of existence. And way too many journalists covering the Mac gave Apple a free pass about this, effectively shrugging their shoulders.

Coda: one of our reporters, the wonderful and much missed Paul Nesbitt, asked Jobs the same question in about 2004. He got barred from Apple press conferences for it. Jobs had many fine qualities, but tolerance for a free press was not one of them.

Extra coda: there were quite a few writers about the Mac at the time who insisted that "it's a rumour until Apple announces it". This is a great tell that a writer isn't a reporter and doesn't understand that by that standard, Watergate was all rumours till Nixon resigned.

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Rebuilding

Back in 2002 (or thereabouts), I started writing up my thoughts on technology at a site that I dubbed "Technovia". About fifteen years later, after about a year's break from blogging, I went back and found that at some point the database holding all that content had become corrupt. Thousands of posts, disappeared, and despite some pretty exhaustive investigation I've yet to find a way to get it back. I could probably do some snazzy SQL export and import, some kind of magic incantation, but at this point, when the site has been down for over a year, it's just not worth it.

Which brings me here: Technovia's successor, which I'll be constructing over the next few weeks and months.

I actually feel like starting with a clean slate is actually appropriate. It's not that I'm ashamed of my old posts, or feel the weight of history on me (there's no way I could be that pretentious -- my one significant contribution to "knowledge" can sit in Archive.org and Wikipedia for the rest of time -- but that I feel there's a new age of technology now, and it deserves somewhere new to write about it.

Hence, here.

The aim is to write something everyday. I'm following the "500ish words" model that MG Siegler pioneered, but hopefully with a little more regularity. It's going to be rough -- think of this as first drafts -- but I think that's perfectly fine.

And I might well stray from the world of technology regularly too. There days, I'm not an active participant in the world of technology journalism. I do more management and thinking about media and business models than I do about bits and bytes. So don't expect too much commentary on the latest tech events only.

I think it will be fun, for me. I hope it will be for you too.

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On David Carr and 20 years of journalism

Originally published: 13th February, 2015

When I started my career as a journalist in 1995, I realised pretty quickly that despite my skills as a writer, I knew precisely nothing about being a reporter. Being able to write is table stakes, something which gains you entry to the door marked “journalism” but doesn’t actually make you a reporter. Everyone can write. Not everyone can report.

I remember the moment I realised what the difference was clearly. My first real reporting task, after a month or so of menial work in the testing labs, involved going along armed with a notebook and eager as anything to a press conference for the release of a Tektronix printer1.

The reporting didn’t take place at the press conference, which was as staged and dull as these things always are. Instead, it took place afterwards, in a bar, with some of the old-school printing trade press journalists (in the days when there was such a thing as the printing trade press). Listening to them talk, I realised the fundamental thing: Journalism is gossip. Professionalised, occasionally slightly pissed, but gossip nevertheless. I could do this. I had never wanted to be a journalist, but suddenly and permanently I had found my home.

And boy did it feel good. For the next ten years or so, I did every kind of technology journalism: reviews, features, columns, and my favourite of all, news. Newswriting was always the best kind of reporting because it was the place where you could really make a mark – or at least you could if you were any good. And MacUser lived on its exclusives, on stories which other Mac publications didn’t even get a sniff of. We prided ourselves on getting stories which companies really didn’t want to be published. Our duty was the readers, and we were fierce about getting the truth for them. If it was revealing a new product’s upcoming release, thus killing off sales of a previous model, so what? We’d saved our readers from buying a dud. If that company then got so outraged at our behaviour they pulled advertising, then fuck ’em – whether you advertised or not didn’t get you any influence on the editorial. Companies knew it, too.

How do you get the stories before anyone else? By gossiping. By understanding that reporting is about people, relationships, who you know, how you talk to them. We bandy around the phrase “cultivating sources”, but all that means is getting to know people and getting them to trust you. Never selling sources down the river, but always being aware of what someone is telling you and why they are telling you.

I’m reminded of all this by the death of David Carr. Carr wasn’t just an average reporter: he got under the skin of his chosen beat, and knew that reporting was fundamentally about people. Watch Carr at work in “Page One”, the documentary which is nominally about his employer but which turns quickly into the David Carr Show. Look at the way he talks on the phone, the easy venom which he drips on the hapless founders of Vice, who, despite their supposed new media smarts, come across like amateurs. This is a man who understands journalism is about people. As his colleague A. O. Scott puts it:

“What else?” was the question that would punctuate every conversation with him. What were you working on? What did you think of this or that political event, show-business caper or piece of office gossip? How was your family? What were you thinking? This was sincere, friendly curiosity, the expression of a naturally gregarious temperament. But it was also the operation of a tireless journalistic instinct. David was always hungry for stories. He was a collector of personalities and anecdotes, a shrewd and compassionate judge of character. A warrior for the truth.

The fundamental thing about journalism remains the same as it’s been for a hundred years: Whatever you do, get the story. Everything else is ancillary. And stories come from, and are about, people. Remember that the next time some journalistic pundit with a safe job in a university calls publishing “a technology business”.