Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: Pixel 7 Pro

  • Lamenting some smartphone repairs

    Yesterday before noon the repaired Pixel 7 Pro smartphone from Google arrived. For the last couple of weeks I had moved back to my Pixel 5 which remains a pretty good smartphone. Apparently, they repaired the phone that I sent back to them via a nice cardboard package they sent me for traveling with a postal carrier. The phone I received back has the exact same IMEI as the one that was sent to them for repairs. Based on that I’m pretty sure they actually repaired the unit that was sent in for repairs and did not issue a replacement phone. I took a close look at the actual phone and didn’t really see any evidence that they heated up the glue that holds the screen in place and got inside it to make some type of repairs. They had it from February 21 to February 28 so it is entirely possible that they did take it apart and effect some type of repair to the screen. I’m not entirely sure what happened and to be honest nothing along the way shared any details about what exactly went wrong or what they did to correct the problem. 

    Based on my observations something within the screen went very wrong. When you hit the power button the top half of the screen would flash with a dark green sort of tint or the whole phone would flash white and then nothing would happen. The phone itself was probably running and waiting for some type of user input, but the screen was dark and unresponsive. A few people certainly encountered this and I tried to look around for solutions or at least other people to chat with you had experienced the same problem. For the most part, when a smartphone behaves like that people send them back for a replacement. In my case the warranty part of the service cycle would have done that for me and has been fine before. I used it when my screen got cracked. They pretty much sent a new replacement phone and I sent the cracked one back to the warranty center. This time around the warranty and repair was done by Google. 

    I loaded the data, contacts, and well everything from my Pixel 5 to the newly repaired Pixel 7 Pro using a standard USB Type-C cable. I pretty much only use official cables from Google chargers that I ordered from the Google store online. The only other charging mechanism that I happen to use is a Google stand for charging. My preferred method of charging is to set the phone on the wireless charging stand. It’s so much easier and used to feel like the future, but now it is more routine than anything else. Completing the data transfer process included moving about 62 gigabytes of data between the phones. It took around 20 minutes and then I had to sign into all the applications which took another hour of time. Getting all the authenticator stuff changed out took maybe another 15 minutes. It was a quick reminder of why I kept my backup phone in the first place. Getting things back in order without some backup would be a lot harder. Based on this exercise about 2 hours of time needs to be reserved to complete the phone transfer process. 

    This post might come across as if I’m lamenting some smartphone repairs and that truly is the case. Overall my trust in the Pixel line of products has been diminished. I was a day one device order for the first 5 generations of Pixel smartphone products. I sat out the Pixel 6 as my enthusiasm for it was limited and some of the initial reports conflicted about the build quality. I jumped back in and ordered two of the Pixel 7 Pro phones and the Pixel Bud Pro’s to go with the phones. Maybe delivering hardware is not the thing that Google is most focused on achieving. My Fitbit certainly has not gotten any great updates or support after the acquisition by Google. I actually switched to the Oura ring recently and abandoned using my Fitbit smartwatch. We will see what happens within the organization changes at Google over the next year. I would not be surprised if hardware fades away altogether.

  • Oh those weird Pixel 7 Pro errors ruined my weekend

    Several generations of phones have been made by Google by this point. I have owned a bunch of different versions. Most of my phones were mostly purchased the day they were released to the public. Right now I have moved back to using my Pixel 5 which works well enough. It is a much smaller phone than the Pixel 7 Pro. However, it has the distinct benefit of working. That is a huge game changing advantage. 

    Things started to go very wrong on Friday in a very strange way. After taking the phone out of my pocket the screen just stayed black and was otherwise non responsive. Things like that have happened before and I knew to hold the power button and the up volume buttons at the same time for like 30 seconds while I wanted for the phone to reboot. This series of events happened several times during the day and it blocked me from being able to make or receive phone calls. You can imagine that it was a very frustrating experience. It really was problematic. 

    Like any well trained consumer of Google products I went online to the store and found the information to report the problem and try to file an insurance claim to maybe get a new phone as this one was obviously breaking down. I have done this series of steps before a couple of times when I had broken screens. I actually have both of my old Pixel 5 smartphones that are at the ready as backup phones. That is a luxury for sure. Keeping a set of working backup phones is not something that everybody is going to maintain. In this case it was a necessity. 

    My request to trigger warranty support was actually denied. I have never had that happen before and it was really just confusing. I went into the support queue and found a chat option to ask about what to do in this case. I tried to report that my Pixel 7 Pro runs Android 13 and has two distinctly weird things going on right now. First, the phone is becoming non responsive and having to be hard reset over and over again. Second, the top half of the phone screen is showing some kind of weird green dots, flashing green motion, general green hue, or going completely dark. The weird screen green coloring, flashing, and motion was certainly something that I have never seen before. 

    During the support chat it was recommended that I need to factory reset the phone. It actually made me wonder how many people are getting this weird black or green screen problem. The last actual backup of my phone was from several hours earlier in the day which was not really a big deal. The loss of some phone call records or texts is not really a big deal. Having to restore all the second factor authentication elements and sign back into all the applictions is really the only super duper annoying part of the equation. Given that the phone was not really operational I went ahead and after the next reboot issued the factory reset. During the reboot the same things mentioned above happened again. I had that moment of fear where I wondered if the phone would now be bricked. A few minutes later something happened and the screen showed the normal first use start up sequence. 

    Being a little flustered at that point and really just lacking any enthusiasm for the event I missed a step and it loaded factory fresh. I had to then execute another factory restart and follow the steps to catch my last backup. My only regret along the way here is that I did not get any photographs or video of what the Pixel 7 Pro was doing. Sadly, I had pulled the Pixel 5 out of storage and after powering it on it wanted to immediately execute a bunch of updates. Instead of snapping photographs I just let the device update. I’m going to circle back to the start of this essay and edit it from start to finish again before moving on to the next paragraph. Right now the Pixel 7 Pro is sitting on the charger. I just don’t trust it at this point and don’t want to carry it around. You forget just how much carrying a smartphone is about trusting that it will be your nexus of communication.