Google Pixel 10

I don't change phones frequently. It's honestly a hassle and I suspect I don't take advantage of half the 'features' modern phones offer. But after my Pixel 6 suffered catastrophic loss of containment on its battery, I decided that even though I had replaced the battery and it seemed fine, I was unsure about how good a job I did replacing the gasket around the screen and therefore unsure about the water resistance of the phone after the repair. And honestly, it was about time. The 6 still had a year of support left, but more and more features were not coming to the 6, so I ordered the 10 on release day. Sure, I could wait a few months and look for sales, but Google was offering $100 in store credit and I had something else in mind to also upgrade and I personally like to be part of something I believe in; and I believe in the Pixel line-up.

Setup and Migration

As mentioned before; this is the part I really dislike, but I was highly impressed with what Google has done here which migrated apps, app data, phone settings, but also the entire contents of my 'sdcard', including all of my local music. I don't know when this complete of a migration was developed but I don't recall this when I upgraded from the 3 to the 6. I started out just letting the phones migrate without plugging them into each other, but at some point it said if plug in the USB cable it will go faster, so I did that. I don't recall how long the process took, and it'll vary by how many apps, how much local storage you use, etc, but it didn't really take all that long and I was pretty happy with the results.

Sure, this is the time you discover some of your apps are no longer in the Play store so they can't transfer, or are 'incompatible', etc, and I wish there was some sort of summary they would send to your GMail or a note on the phone or something alerting you to the things which did not transfer, but none-the-less, I went through my apps and found a few 'missing'. Several of which I was able to easily side-load, a few I decided I wasn't using any more or had already really replaced with something else, etc. All in all, validating my apps only took maybe 30 or 45 minutes total.

I did have some quirks in the sdcard migration. First; anything with a .nomedia file contained in the parent directory did not copy over, which I find rather odd. The .nomedia file is intended to prevent things from showing up in photo galleries, such as icon packs etc. I noticed when I found some Tasker tasks were missing icons. Not a big deal to fix, just seems odd.

Another oddity I observed, not necessarily directly related to the sdcard migration itself was that all of my local Notifications / Alarms / Phone Ringtones were triplicated on the 10. I noticed this in the Sounds app when updating notications for things and ultimately combined all of them back into one directory and cleaned up duplicates and re-scanned media. After that, no more duplicates were shown in the Sounds app and I was able to assign notifications to things again.

I'm not sure how much Google can do about notification sounds; but seems like every migration some of them are maintained and some of them are not. All of my personal ringtones were maintained, most of my app notifications were maintained, but some of them were set to the default. It's possible this was due to me cleaning up the duplicates and perhaps it had assigned one of the duplicate files I cleaned up, and then did the next best thing and just reset it to the default notification sound, not sure.

Luckily my Samsung Watch 4 migrated over to the 10 effortlessly, including my custom watch faces etc. This, too, was impressively simple and slick.

SIM Migration

This was legitimately something I was concerned about; I'm on T-Mobile pre-paid and their customer service is, to be kind, awful. I did not look forward to having some issue and having to work with them to resolve it.

So I put it off for a week or two, messing with the new phone, twiddling settings, etc, finally decided to migrate from the SIM on my 6 to the eSIM on the 10. And when I went to do it...... it just worked. I scanned a QR code, tapped a few things on the screen as it prompted. It was done. I had service. Okay then, nice! Whew!

New Shiny!

As mentioned earlier; there's a lot of stuff I really don't use to its full capability on my phone. I don't use many "AI" features, I've been pretty happy with the camera on the 6 for casual photos, etc. This said, there are some pretty nice features that have been added between the two phones. Some of them are dumb, like most of the AI stuff honestly, but who doesn't want to take a picture of their car and tell Gemini to put the car in the middle of a runway and give it a wrap.

Other things, eh, phone honestly doesn't feel faster, doesn't run longer on battery, doesn't feel any different. It's basically all the same. But that's really okay with me, I know it's good for years to come both physically as well as software support and there are little perks here and there that enjoy. Honestly there are so many software features on the Pixel 10 I don't think covering any of them here makes sense; there are lots of other sources detailing them and I would not do as good a job at it.

Accessories

I always use a case on my phone, so as usual I went with a minimal Spigen case as I really like how much protection they give without additional bulk. The Spigen Rugged Armor MagFit to be specific. It has the 'Pixelsnap' magnets built into the case so that you can use it with any of those type of accessories, including wireless charging stands.

My old no-brand cheapie wireless charger was not functioning with my Pixel 10 for some reason, so I grabbed a Belkin Qi2 charger which I've written an article on as well.

Summary

I don't update for every new device; but ultimately each time I do, I'm happy I did. I do like to hang on to devices as long as they're trouble-free and supported and prefer to keep electronics out of the landfills. This makes my eighth Google device, starting with the Nexus 1, and my fourth Pixel device. I still use my Pixel Tablet daily, and overall very happy with my Google devices.