Android is the mobile operating system for me. It has been for quite a many years. I especially love the vanilla experience and have been a proud owner of Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 5X, Pixel and now Pixel 2. I’ve also had a couple of devices from HTC and Samsung. I love having the latest and greatest from Google and am happy to pay the big price of the last two generations of Google-made phones in order to get the vanilla experience, fast updates, and the most optimized hw-sw combo there is.
One thing that has *always* bothered me is battery life. No matter what phone I’ve been using the battery life has never been good. Doesn’t matter what sort of battery saving strategies I’ve been using (builtin, limiting services/apps etc.) or what resources the apps have been able to use, the juice has always run out surprisingly easily. At the same time some people around me have had *vastly* better experiences on their iDevices. That has sucked a big time.
This has now changed. Pixel 2 and the latest and greatest of the Google’s mobile OS deliver. I don’t have any numbers to share and am not interested in checking them up from the system stats since everything’s subjective and one person’s usage habits very rarely match anyone else’s. But I’m the type of user who wants to get multiple hours of screen time through various reading-this-and-that sessions, browsing the web to its bottom, and taking the phone into hand when you literally have to wait 35 seconds for the bus.
Pixel 2 running Oreo 8.1 has consistently delivered a MUCH BETTER battery life experience than *ANY* of my previous devices (first paragraph). This is not just a tad better, this is hugely better. The phone lasts so long that it has surprised me multiple times and had me over and again spontaneously praise it to my iGeeky brother. This is something totally different.
I really do hope this is more an advancement in the OS and not specific to the Pixel 2 hardware. If you’re interested, I really recommend to check out Ars Technica’s excellent deep-dive review of the new Google phones over here. The picture below is from their review and shows the excellence – at least in what I use my phone for, web browsing and stuff, not gaming. If you’ve got some insight or speculation to this happy matter, please share!
