Buying the Pixel Buds Pro was decided from the start, and its release was completely expected. Because the first-gen and second-gen Pixel Buds had no noise cancelling and mediocre battery life, they looked like half-finished products in every way. So I bought the Pixel Buds Pro not long after it came out. Worth mentioning: I bought it through Wellbot, and it was actually $50 off at launch — a pretty big discount. My expectations for the Pixel Buds Pro were simple: the noise cancelling just had to work, and it must not do what the previous Pixel Buds did, where one ear’s battery suddenly died. When it arrived, the box was smaller too — no idea if that’s to go along with the so-called “environmental friendliness.”

I decided to switch to the Pixel 6 Pro a long time ago, because the Pixel 4 XL was just too slow. But this phone somehow sold way better than expected. Normally you’d get a Nexus/Pixel within the first week, but this one was out of stock forever. In the end, a guy who runs a proxy-buying service, “Watermelon Daigou,” generously helped me out, barely charging me any fee, and I got the Pixel 6 Pro 256GB white version at retail price. It’s been a while since I got it, so let me talk about how it feels. I’ll skip the generic stuff and get straight to the real points.

On September 30, 2020, Google announced this year’s new phone, the Pixel 5. But a month before that event, I picked up Google’s previous-year flagship, a Pixel 4 XL 128GB. There was a reason for that: the Pixel 5 is just that bad. Hole-punch screen, downgraded processor, squeeze sensor gone, IR gone, radar gone — by any measure it’s a piece of junk at the level of a thousand-yuan phone, the kind that competes with Xiaomi’s Redmi over here. Google’s explanation is that this time they used a bigger battery and a 5G-capable chip, so the overall experience hasn’t been downgraded. Oh my god, don’t you know Redmi has supported 5G for ages? Big battery, you say? Hell, which domestic thousand-yuan phone has a smaller battery than yours? Google proudly announced a price of $699. Bear in mind that buying a domestic phone (one that can be bootloader-unlocked) only costs me around 2000 RMB. Only an idiot would buy your Pixel 5. It’s not a flagship at all.

Why did I even buy this thing… probably because I had such a good time with my last-gen Pixel Buds. I was actually pretty happy with the Pixel Buds, except the fit was beyond words. That dangling cord was just stupid. I mostly wore them running, and that damn cord kept swinging around, teaching me what “occlusion effect” really means. Now the Google Pixel Buds 2 finally exist, and the stupid cord is gone. But this thing Google built to pair with Pixel phones and fight Apple’s AirPods is still as unreliable as ever: No AptX support Only white at launch Various problems and complaints shortly after release But Google products are American-made after all, and plenty of American tech media started hyping it from day one, the same way they hype the Pixel line. If it’s Google, it can’t be too bad. And after the hype, they go home and keep using their iPhones…

The Pixel Stand was half price on Black Friday. Great news, except for one small problem: the half-price Pixel Stand was at Best Buy. If you’ve ever tried to buy stuff from overseas, you know Best Buy is one of those sites where it’s basically impossible. They ruthlessly cancel anything shipping to a forwarding address, which means you need a real US address to buy. Lucky for me, I had a friend in the States. Thanks to Enneamer, a.k.a. “Dirty Teacher,” I finally got my hands on the one wireless charging dock that can fast-charge a Pixel 3 XL.

My previous phone was a Sony Xperia Z Premium. I used it for over a year, close to two years, and Sony recently said it would push out Google’s Android Pie OTA update to that phone too—every version except the Hong Kong one got it. But in the end I decided to replace it, with Google’s flagship phone released this year, the Google Pixel 3 XL. Plenty of people aren’t optimistic about Google’s new flagship—its specs are behind, it looks ugly, and it isn’t exactly cheap either. After using it for a while since it arrived, it really does have quite a few problems, but I’m still fairly satisfied, so I’ll briefly go over my first impressions.

Google Pixel Buds are Bluetooth earbuds from Google. Unlike the other Bluetooth earbuds that came out around the same time, these supposedly support all sorts of real-time translation, plus Google Assistant of course.

I’d been using the Moto 360 2nd, but it had been nearly two years, so I figured it was time for a change. Then the LG Watch Sports came out, and I saw you couldn’t swap the strap, so I didn’t buy it. Half a year went by and there was still nothing I liked. I figured, fine, if I can’t change the strap, then I just won’t change it… When I went to order the LG Watch Sports on Google Play, the titanium version was out of stock, of course. Then one night I refreshed out of boredom and there it was. Ordered it right away, and it turned out I’d picked the wrong payment method and paid $16 extra in shipping, even though the Google Play Store page said free shipping. I was worried it’d sell out so I didn’t look closely. The next day I saw the extra charge and asked Google for a refund. They said no… So I said, fine, I’ll return it and order again. They said it had been more than two hours, so no returns… I’ve got a few choice words for them that I’ll keep to myself. So I chalked it up as a lesson learned. The surprise was that when it arrived via a forwarding service, there was no customs duty… I looked, and the customs declaration listed the thing as an “electronic watch.” Clever. I wonder if next time I forward a phone they could write “cordless telephone”…

Things have been tight lately for reasons, so I’ll keep this short and to the point about the Nexus 5X.

I’ve been using the Google Pixel C for a good while now, but there are a few problems I need to mention… The touchscreen is really unresponsive. Foreign users have reported this badly, and a lot of them ended up asking for a replacement, which didn’t help. The keyboard keeps double-clicking or registering multiple presses. Some foreign users have this; I haven’t hit it. Weak Wi-Fi signal. Didn’t hit that one either. But an unresponsive touchscreen is bad enough on its own. It doesn’t just mess with normal operation — I couldn’t even use the Jot Dash stylus I bought for it..