I bought the Pixel 9 when it first came out and it is, without a doubt, the best phone I’ve ever had. Prior to this the Pixel 3 was what I used to judge my other phones by.

But, it isn’t AI that makes the phone great… it just works very well, is powerful and has a great camera (oh, I suppose the AI parts of the camera help a ton). As far as Gemini goes, with the purchase of my phone I received access to Gemini Pro (or whatever they call it), it’s the service they charge $20 per month for… and it is absolute shit. It’s fun for creating AI generated images, and does a pretty good job at it. But as a replacement for Google it is worse than useless. It absolutely refuses to answer any questions about politics. It gives incorrect answers to the most simple of questions (I was tired one night and just wanted a sanity check on a simple math problem, and it confidently told me that my answer was correct… it wasn’t, I was off by a factor of 100). And it is making Google Assistant even more unreliable than it had already become.

AI didn’t ruin the gadget, my phone is still an amazing phone AND I’ve been able to use it to access my own AI system running at home. But the idea that corporate owned AI systems are something that we should strive towards, or even consider using is the main issue.