The Google Pixel Is a Throwback to a Time When Smartphones Were Still Interesting

Let’s get this out of the way: Smartphones are boring now. The phones look alike, function the same, all run Facebook. Yes, the devil is in the details — the AMOLED screens, Snapdragon processors, camera sensors and megapixels — but, unless you run through four or five phones a year, those are not very interesting. This was not always the case. There was a time when just hearing about new phones was exciting. Improvement was exponential, not incremental. Each release came