I was this close to buying a Pixel 2 XL last week. Stood in the Verizon store on my lunch break, phone in hand, credit card literally out of my wallet, and then I didn't do it. Good thing too, because the last seven days have turned into a pretty rough stretch of PR for that $849 phone.
If you haven't been following it: the Pixel 2 XL uses a POLED panel made by LG instead of the Samsung AMOLED panel in the smaller Pixel 2, and it has not gone well. Reviewers started posting about it within days of the phone shipping on the 19th. Colors look washed out and muted compared to what we're used to from flagship Android phones (compared to the smaller Pixel 2 especially, which people are saying looks noticeably punchier sitting right next to it). Tilt the XL even a little off-angle and there's a blue tint that creeps in. And then there's the burn-in stuff, which is the part that actually worries me. Some review units are already showing faint ghosting of the nav bar buttons after less than two weeks of regular use. Two weeks. On a phone that costs as much as a decent laptop.
Google's response so far has basically been "we hear you, a software update is coming to fix the color saturation," plus they bumped the warranty on the display to two years. Which, fine, that's something, but a software update can maybe make the colors look more saturated. It cant un-burn-in a screen. If pixels are already wearing unevenly this early, that's a hardware problem, not a calibration slider you tweak in a settings menu.
Here's my actual opinion on this, since I know some of you will say I'm overreacting: I don't think this kills the phone. The camera by every account is still excellent, maybe the best on any Android phone right now, and the rest of the hardware is solid. But I think anyone buying the XL specifically (not the smaller Pixel 2) right now is basically volunteering to be part of an ongoing experiment, and paying flagship prices to do it. That's the part that bugs me. I don't mind early adopter risk on cheap stuff. I mind it a lot more on an $849 phone I'm going to be staring at every day for the next two years.
Small tangent, not really related except in the sense that its also a "trust is fraying a little" story this week: Bad Rabbit ransomware hit a bunch of networks in Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday, including some media outlets and at least one metro system's ticketing infrastructure from what I read. Different flavor of tech news, obviously, way more serious in terms of actual consequences, but it's the same general mood I keep noticing lately. Stuff ships, stuff has problems, and the fixes come after the fact instead of before.
Anyway. I ended up walking out of the Verizon store with nothing, which my wallet is thanking me for. I'm going to wait and see if the software update actually does anything meaningful for the color issue, and more importantly wait and see if the burn-in reports are an early-unit fluke or a real pattern once more people have had these phones for a month or two. If you already bought one, I'm curious to hear how it's holding up, drop me an email. I know a couple of you jumped on the preorder back in the first week of October and would genuinely like to know if you're regretting it.
One more thing while I'm here: the smaller Pixel 2 doesn't seem to have any of these display complaints, which makes we wonder if some of this is specifically an LG panel supply issue rather than a "Google doesn't know how to make phones" issue. Worth keeping an eye on whether that distinction holds up over the next few weeks or if it turns out to be a bigger story than one bad batch of panels.