A month ago, I got the first generation Google Pixel XL that I bought on eBay. While I haven’t been actively collecting the top footprint phones in the smartphone era for ten and a half years, I love to have them around. The Pixel isn’t one of them, as it was released without shame and honor and didn’t even reach countries like Spain.

It didn’t have the depth that its predecessor would have left in photography, nor the price of some of the premium models of the older Nexus that it had accomplished. Still got good money. Reason? Something I didn’t appreciate at all at its launch in 2016: The original Pixel will always have original quality free storage in Google Photos.

I got over the Google Photos “loss” but never knew what to do with my videos

Not having original quality in Google Photos didn’t matter to me when the company launched the service because most of the photos I took were less than 16MP and compression always looked great to me. The farewell announcement of unlimited free storage put an end to that, but above all with the comfort of knowing that videos of great memories in higher or lower quality are safe.

I switched to Amazon Photos for images and started to manage everything better locally, because with the growth of my digital library, I saw that I needed a unified approach to Google Photos. I used YouTube upload as an alternative to sharing with relatives in relatively good quality. At some point, however, I felt that neither option fully convinced me.

I could have paid for Google storage but now I was making a lot more videos that I wanted to keep in the cloud in original quality and any payment plan that doesn’t mean “unlimited storage” would fall short for mefor a price he deeply does not want to bear.

So I remembered that the Pixel and Pixel XL kept their unlimited downloads free and uncompressed forever, with Google’s promise of some kind of contracted choice. All the videos and photos I took with my camera or cell phone would be uploaded to the cloud in original quality without taking up a single megabyte of space.. I needed to design a system for them to reach a local folder on Pixel. It would then upload everything as if it had captured the content itself.

During the time I got the terminal, I uploaded about 500GB of content. When I sync I do it with very little effort With the open source miracle that is Syncthing (and with the help of OneDrive and Dropbox to automatically transfer my iOS movie to my computer) it’s everything I want. The NAS option was there and required a higher expense, though more complete. For now, it gives me (technological) life to feel again that I can upload what I want and that I don’t have to control myself and refuse to take videos or photos because of storage problems.

The Pixel XL is more than just unlimited downloads, it’s also a testament to the maturity of Android over the years.

I’ve already explained why I bought the terminal and what I use it for. However, it also Helped me enjoy your camera againand remember a time when computational photography already existed, but still had a relative influence on the final result. Likewise, it allowed me to remember the naturalness of the RAW photos of those years taken with a mobile phone, but to underestimate the results in favor of automatic shooting, which I have become less and less intolerant of.

Viewing and editing “raw” photos taken with it gives me almost the same pleasure as these photos. Made with HTC 10. as a picture with daisy This is all I want from today’s mobile phones about naturalness.

This is how the Google Pixel XL auto fired

100% auto shot crop. In addition to the most obvious lack of naturalness, there is a noticeable loss of detail compared to RAW.

This is how the Pixel XL was shot in RAW with Lightroom.

The naturalness of rendered RAW is magical (AI noise reduction applied). Crop 100% of the image.

With all this, Pixel already satisfies me and confirms my investment. However, besides another pair of terminals I have with Android 13 (latest stable version available), I was also very happy to be able to use this as my main mobile for a few days. i miss almost nothing.

On the one hand, it’s because I’ve been using iOS more and more over the years, because I’m getting into features less and less, because Both systems are overwhelmed. On the other hand, I see Android as a system with almost no shortcomings since Nougat 7.0.

I think Android should stop updating it every year, because the ones that have been coming to it for five years are useful but very few. And that’s something I confirm that I can only use a version from 4 years ago. I’ve thoroughly tested the new ones and like them, but I’m not missing much. My colleague Ricardo Aguilar also thinks so after using Android 14 thoroughly, we go from the boring version to the boring version.

The biggest Android change in recent times is called Material You. It permeates the system with a new aroma that is missing and missed in Android 10. But Google’s design language was already mature in 2019. and I don’t feel awkward at all when using the systemWell, there are other graphical innovations like dark mode, released in this version at a general level on the system.

Another of the things I value most about modern smartphones is the gestures that have been available since Android 10 after a ragged first try is also on this Pixel. It’s a modern experience, and as a strong advocate for manufacturers who need to update Android sooner and longer, I feel this way these days with the Pixel XL: Just one point very important, security updates.

The Pixel XL stopped receiving them shortly before the pandemic, and many vulnerabilities have since been fixed by Google and others. In this sense, using Pixel for personal or work-related problems, I expose myself much more than a terminal with Android 13but this is not something you are usually aware of on a daily basis.

Google has no problem updating Android with functions they may have provided for minor versions in the past. Google has had a very good operating system for years. And that’s something to celebrate. Especially if tomorrow your mobile does not update to Android 14. You probably don’t care. You probably already have everything you need.

on Xataka | The Nothing Phone (2) is proof that even “pure” Android needs an ally: raw power