Got your hands on the new Google Pixel 2XL yet? Yes, I’m a Google guy but I have a confession to make about this latest phone model.
In this Video, Peter talks about what he loves and hates about his new Google Pixel 2XL.
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Transcription:
G’day, guys. Peter Moriarty here. In this video, I’m going to be sharing a business lesson that took me nine months to learn with the Google Pixel. I’m going to start off with a bit of a confession. The Pixel is great phone overall, but there’s something that’s been really bugging at me since I bought this, and I actually only just worked it out literally in the last couple of days. So here we go. I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story. It’s story time. For the longest time, I was a Mac fan. Mac everything. Grew up in a family full of Macs, and even then had every iPhone. I was the kind of guy who would line up at the midnight launches when new iPhone models would come out. I’ve done that for multiple iPhone launches.
And then as I got further and further into the Google ecosystem, I started to consider making the switch over to Android. But it wasn’t until Google released to the Pixel phone, Pixel 1, that I actually went ahead and made the shift. I jumped on Gumtree, I bought a secondhand one for 500 bucks, tried it out, loved it, and made the switch. Now, when the Pixel 2 came out, I thought, “Of course, time to upgrade.” Went down to Telstra and got myself an upgrade to the next version. However, there’s been a problem with this phone since I got it, which was December last year. It’s been something that’s been kind of eating away at me.
For all of that time, I’ve had colleagues, I’ve had staff, I’ve had business associates, I’ve had friends, I’ve had family say, “How’s the Pixel?” I’ve said, “It’s amazing,” but that’s only been 95% the truth. See, here’s the thing, I’ve had a problem with charging with this phone since I got it. Now, when I first got the phone, about three days into ownership with the phone, I dropped it down a lift shaft. I was with a friend. My friend turned around, knocked it out of my hand, and it fell between the two floors on the lift shaft, right? I knew the phone wasn’t broken because I could see the lights were on. I could see that it kind of landed underneath where I could reach between the elevator car and the floor. But the problem is that I couldn’t get to it.
The next day I flew out overseas and I was overseas for five weeks, right? So this phone was stuck there. While I was overseas, I was calling the building management and asking them to go and retrieve it, but they never really went and got it. It wasn’t until I got home, I flew back down to Melbourne where it was and literally hassled the building manager face-to-face, until they finally went and got the lift company to go and retrieve the phone.
Rechargeable batteries, you should know, don’t like being left completely charged or completely depleted for long periods of time, right? So this phone, three days old, dropped down a lift shaft, obviously ran out of battery within about 12 hours. And then after that, it was off for like nearly six weeks, right? So since that time that I got the phone back, it’s had a problem with charging. That’s been the whole time that I’ve owned the phone.
There’s one of these great things with these newer phones, right? The newer iPhones do it and the newer Pixels do it as well. Even the Pixel 1 did it. It’s called fast charge. If you’ve got a USB-C plug, right? A USB-C looks like this. This is the modern adapter. If you’re on an Android device or if you’ve got a new GoPro, you’re going to be using USB-C. Apple don’t use USB-C, they still use Lightning, but both phones support this fast charging. Now, the Pixel 1 and the Pixel 2 both support fast charging. You’ve got to use a USB-C cable. It does this special super rapid charging. What that means is within about an hour, it’ll get your phone to about 80% battery from zero, right? Which is really great. Particularly if you’re on the go, like I am a lot of the time. I find that I sometimes will even deplete the phone’s full charge on the same day, so sometimes after lunch, it needs a bit more juice.
Here’s the problem. My phone has not been fast charging since I got it. The fast charge has just never worked. It works on slow charge. That takes about three or four hours for a full charge to happen. But the fast charge has never worked. It’s really been bugging me. Every time I’ve been in the country in Australia and wanted to get the problem fixed, I’ve called Telstra and said, “Hey, what’s the returns process for this phone? I got it and pretty much ever since I’ve got it, it’s not been working. It’s just not fast charging for me.” Telstra said to me, “Oh, well, you’ve got to ship it back to us. It might take up to six weeks and blah blah blah.” I thought, “Oh my God, that’s too much trouble for me.”
Number one, I’m not going to be in the country long enough. I literally haven’t been in the country for longer than 30 days this year. But number two, I’m going to have to go and find myself another phone because, you know, they were going to give me a lend phone, but it was one of those dumb phones without apps or whatever so I couldn’t run my business from it. It was just one of those things that I kind of let go by the wayside, right? So I’ve been stuck with this phone that hasn’t fast charged for a year. My God, it’s nearly killed me, right? What that means is if I’m out and about, usually what I do, is I grab a power bank, like one of these. Brand called Anker. They make fantastic power banks. You grab the phone cable, plug in the phone cable to the power bank, plug in the phone cable to your phone, and boom, it’ll charge. The other option is car charger. When you’re in the car, plug it into the car charger. I’ve got an Anker car charger, which gives power delivery and that will charge the phone.
The problem is with this phone, even when plugged into these chargers, the battery depletes faster than it charges, and that’s a problem. If, for example, I’m in the car and I’ve got it plugged in and I’m navigating, it’s not actually going to increase my battery. So when I get to my destination, the battery’s lower than when I plugged it in. That’s a real problem for a guy that spends most of his day on the phone running my business from wherever I am and wherever I need to be. What did I do? What did I found out? I thought, “Well, maybe it’s Anker. Maybe there’s something changed in Google’s firmware. They’ve rolled out an update and Anker devices no longer work,” right? So I bought more Anker devices and I tried different models and I tried different charging cables. I thought, “Maybe it’s the cable,” and that’s wrong. Didn’t end up being that.
I searched around Reddit forums and I thought, “Oh, well maybe it’s the phone, maybe they’ve got a new update and they no longer support third-party fast charging. Maybe that’s the problem.” Couldn’t work it out there. I called Telstra and said, “Hey, have there been any problems with the Pixel phones?” They said, “No, that’s fine,” all the while in the back of my mind knowing that honestly I dropped this phone down a lift for six weeks. If it was broken, it was probably my fault. My conscience was kind of like, “If Telstra refuse to give me a new phone, I can call the consumer hotline and have a whinge and start an argument, but really, I’m the one who dropped it down a lift, right? Maybe I should just deal with it or claim it on business insurance or whatever.”
Anyway, it’s just honestly one of those things that I put up with, which as you can imagine, was pretty frustrating to happen every single day for my phone to run out and not be fully charged. So what my solution was, was to just use the standard cable that you get with the phone and plug it into the wall, because the wall charger always worked for fast charging. I thought, “That’s really weird. The wall charger works fine for fast charging, but these really cool Anker super-duper chargers don’t actually work for fast charging.” Well, I worked it out. Are you ready for me to close the loop for you?
I found out just in the last week when I was at an Anker store playing around with a different model of Anker power bank. I was having a look at the Anker power bank, and this was with the store staff. I was explaining what’s been happening with my phone. The fast charging doesn’t work. They said, “No, no, no, no, no, sir. Fast charging definitely works with Anker products.” I said, “No, it doesn’t. I’ve had this phone for nine months and the fast charge doesn’t work. I dropped it down a lift. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason why it doesn’t work.” They said, “No, no, no, you must be doing something wrong.” I said, “Okay, well, let me plug in your power bank and I’ll show you that fast charge is broken on this phone. Slow charge is the only one that works.” I plugged in my phone into this Anker power bank, and fast charge works instantly. What could that be?
What I worked out … And I did some more googling around, and I had this light bulb moment. When USB switched from … This is called USB-A, the square plugs that everybody knows and have been around since probably the ’90s or so, right? That’s called USB-A. The new standard is called USB-C. This is a USB-C to USB-C cable, right? Not that special. You might not think that it’s that special. I plug one end into the wall with the genuine charger that came with the Pixel and the other end goes into either my Pixelbook, which is my Google laptop, or it goes into my Google Pixel phone. Now, what I found in my research just in the last 48 hours is that the new USB-C cables, if they are USB-C to USB-C and not USB-A to USB-C, support a new fast charging protocol called power delivery. These are the only cables which will allow the Pixel 2 to fast charge.
The Pixel 1 could fast charge off these cables fine, but it wasn’t really fast charging because, I mean, Google said this is charging rapidly, but it wasn’t actually charging as fast as the new specification for power delivery over USB-C. So where I had my Pixel 1 fast charging on these cables with these old Anker chargers, it wasn’t until I got an Anker charger with a USB-C charging port and a USB-C to USB-C cable, that my Pixel 2 now fast charges, which it would’ve done all along for the last excruciatingly painful nine months if I had known that I needed to actually just use a stupid USB-C cable
So here’s my point. This is obviously one of those things where I will be kicking myself forevermore, forevermore that I didn’t work this out earlier. My laptop’s gone asleep, so I need to wake it up before I can show you something. But the important business lesson is here that if you have the incorrect data, if you don’t have the right data inputs, then you’re not going to be able to get the right outputs. In your business, if you’re not relying on good data to make decisions in your business, then you’re not going to be able to grow and scale and lead a successful business. It’s super easy to make decisions just on your gut or just based on hope. What’s harder is gathering data, gathering accurate data, ensuring that data is verified and accurate, and then making decisions based on data, because true data-based decisions are the smartest and the best decisions.
I wanted to show you this. There’s something that we’ve been using for a while. It’s called Google Data Studio. It’s a Google product. It’s actually free if you’re on G Suite, which is pretty cool. We’ve built out our own business dashboard … That might be a little bit hard to see. There we go. Cool. We’ve built out a business dashboard which shows us all of the data in our business and exactly where things are going. What that does, is that allows me as a business owner and my team, the managers on my team who need to make decisions every day, it allows us to make data-based decisions that don’t have emotion included, don’t have gut feeling, don’t have hope included. They are data-based decisions.
If I had the right data, if I had the right data, then I would have known that this was an incorrect decision, to try and get this to work on an old cable. It’s as simple as that. But because of the data that I thought I had, I had a Pixel 1 and it worked fine with those cables. I had the causation that I turned into correlation, which was that I dropped my phone down a lift and then magically, I decided that that was the reason that the phone was dead. I had number three, I tried multiple cables on it, tried multiple chargers and I tried multiple car chargers and it still didn’t work, but I had the wrong data. All I needed was a simple different cable.
So that’s my challenge to you, is the next time you’ve got to make decisions in your business, make sure that you are making them on hard data, and make sure you’re making them on the right data. Now, if you’re interested in something like this, like Google Data Studio, so you can make better business decisions in your business. This is data that can be pulled from a spreadsheet. It can be pulled from Xero. It can be pulled from other data sources.
We are in the planning and launch phase of launching this to our members. This is a product that we’re going to release for free to our Cloud Concierge support members. So if you’re not already a member, this may be a ideal opportunity for you to consider our membership, have a chat to our team by messaging itGenius … I’ll put a link below … or you can head along to our website, itgenius.com. But this is built on a Google tool called Google Data Studio. It’s not something I recommend you go and try and set up yourself unless you’ve got days and days of free time to go and do that. But our team can help you set up a live, working, rocking and rolling dashboard for your business so you can make better data-based decisions every day.
Anyway, until next time, I’ll see it later. Take care. If you want to have a laugh at me, that’s totally fine. Pop your comments below. Or maybe you can share a story of where you’ve made a good data-based decision or a poor data-based decision in your business. Anyway. Until next time, catch you later. Cheers.
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