My Pixel bit the dust, so I’m trying a phone that’s not Apple, Google, or Samsung

My household hasn’t had much luck with technology so far this year. First, my wife’s foldable was on the fritz, and now my trust Pixel 8 Pro has bit the dust. In all my years of owning swanky tech, I can’t recall the last time I’ve had two expensive gadgets fail on me in quite such quick succession. Talk about bad luck.

It’s hard to pinpoint precisely what’s gone wrong with my beloved Pixel 8 Pro (besides the picture above, of course), but it’s become unusable in several different but equally debilitating ways. The display flickers randomly when there’s any moderately demanding task to do, obscuring virtually everything from view. The interface crawls to a halt after I’ve used the camera or played a game. And the fingerprint scanner now fails to read my print about 90% of the time. Putting it all together, I think the phone’s Tensor G3 processor is on the way out — hardly a convincing inning for a little over a year of use, but not entirely surprising either, given Google’s dubious history with chip development.