Google Pixel 10 series review

My older Pixel got the UI updates and I hate them. The look is inelegant, even childish, and like Apple they've decided to hide things under extra button presses.

The insistence on adding AI just makes startup slower. I have not had a single use for AI on my phone ever, though I'm a big fan of it for software dev.

My "older" pixel (9 XL) is also now slower as a result.

It literally takes a half a second to tap "speaker" during the dialer after the update, which it didn't before.

Disappointing.

I'm curious how these changes align with their accessibility commitments.

For those struggling with impairments it must be hard to continue to adapt to your phone shape shifting with each update.

The AI tax is crazy, Pixels now reserve 3.5GB of RAM to keep Googles local models permanently loaded regardless of how much you use them, or whether you use them at all. The base Pixel 10 has 12GB of RAM so that's nearly a third set aside for something you may never use!

Last year they had the relative sense to only enable that "feature" on the higher end SKUs with 16GB of RAM, while the lower end SKUs with 12GB would load the models on-demand, but starting with the Pixel 10 series it now applies across the board.

I've used nova launcher on my pixel phones for maybe 6 years now. I specifically switched to it because I didn't like UI updates that moved things around -- I like to customize my UI and have it stay there after an update.

That is wild. And so disrespectful of apps that may need that extra memory. I wonder if GrapheneOS will also suffer this memory overhead, once they do support this newest Android. Or possibly allow disabling it.

This only happens if the AICore app is installed. Since it isn't on Graphene then the full 16gb allocation of ram is available for the entire system.

I've read people say that there is a setting to disable it.

Don't you have problems with the app drawer not being scrollable until the launcher's restart? The app is sadly no longer maintained

Thanks for the reminder. I just disabled AICore and freed 2GB in my Pixel 9 Pro.

Yep, same. But mostly because I didn't want a Google search bar on the screen all the time. And I use DDG anyway for that.

Yeah, just got them too and I also dislike them. Everything got really big and ugly and I couldn't figure out how to do what seemed like obvious things.

I don't get what they are trying to do with it; previous updates were mostly fine, but really don't like this one.

Is this the one that very cleverly removed the full contact list from the Phone 'app', changed the Take/Deny call orientation, and made everything 200% bigger? Because I [expletive] hate it and don't see how in any way it's better.

Now I have to open up the contact list, a completely seperate 'app' to call someone if i can't quite remember who they are, so can't use the Phone's search functionality. So dumb. Well, it's trying to be smart, but I want it to stay dumb.

I wish we could preview these things and decide if we want them or not, rather than waking up to find the phone's decided to wear a new change of clothes and we have to tickle it differently to get it to do what we need (not want, NEED).

You can disable updates, it's the second thing I do on every new phone. (The first thing I do is disabling sounds.)

I was frustrated with some other change to Phone a while ago and was angry but then decided to just make the mental switch to Contacts as my main entry to phone long ago. I only ever go into phone directly if I need the dialer. But frankly I can't say I use phone itself much anymore, mostly I use some form of messaging. (But I have used Niagara launcher for a long time so finding Phone when needed is super easy/fast)

You can still get the full contacts list. Press the menu button and then press "Contacts".

I used to be all about nova launcher on my android phones. But they got purchased by a mobile data analytics company a while back. I don't trust them anymore and I don't recommend them anymore. Good thing there are loads of quality alternatives available.

What do you prefer?