Despite the fact that we live in an era of wireless technologies, when you can even charge a smartphone wirelessly, manufacturers still hesitate to abandon external connectors and regularly continue to equip branded devices, if not a full set of wired interfaces, then at least one USB-C. This is a universal standard, which is not only convenient from the point of view of use due to its two-sidedness, but also quite efficient, providing high data transfer rates. True, as it turned out, not all of them.
Pixel smartphones have extremely slow USB-C transfer rates
Almost all Google Pixel smartphones are equipped with USB-C 3.1 connectors. The only exceptions are the first-generation models, which had USB-C 3.0, and the budget Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL, which, in order to save money, supplied the even older USB-C 2.0. The main difference between connectors of different generations is the speed of data transfer: the newer the interface, the higher the speed it can develop, at least for writing, at least for reading, which in turn significantly reduces the time spent on loading and unloading. But in the case of 'pixels' it somehow doesn't feel too much.
Fastest USB smartphones
Comparison of 10.8GB file transfer rate in seconds. The smaller the result, the better
Colleagues from Android Authority conducted a comparative test of the data transfer speed via USB-C on smartphones from different manufacturers and found that the Google Pixel was experiencing clear problems. For the test, the 'pixels' of all four generations were taken, and for the competition they were selected Huawei Mate 30 Pro, OnePlus 7 Pro, Galaxy S10e and Honor View 20. Before the experiment, all devices were cleaned RAM, so as not to provoke an accidental slowdown due to the background work of applications, and entered them into the USB file transfer mode, after which they transferred a 10.8 GB video file from the computer memory to the smartphone memory and vice versa.
As you can see in the graph, the Pixel 2 showed itself best of the 'pixel' line, which took 55 seconds to read and write a video file. This is not a record figure, as many competitors did not perform well, but the results of the rest of the Google Pixel smartphones were even worse. Yes, the memory standard also plays a big role in the transfer rate – the Galaxy S10e and Honor View 20 have UFS 2.1 memory, but they almost doubled even the Pixel 4. We don't know what memory comes with the Pixel 4, but Google is unlikely to equip it with an older standard than UFS 2.1, which was used in the Pixel 2.
How to speed up USB data transfer
Most likely, the problem of low speed lies in software glitches, but for some reason Google is in no hurry to fix them.
Most likely, the reason for the slow data transfer shown by Pixel smartphones lies in the special implementation of the Media Transfer protocol. It is he who is responsible for exchanging files in the 'Transfer via USB' mode, which is activated when the smartphone is wired to a computer. But since this protocol is purely software in nature, it is quite possible that the problem stems from failures in the firmware on the basis of which Google branded smartphones function. Is it possible? Quite, given that the company's developers have to release monthly updates with fixes of certain bugs. Another thing is that they may not even be aware of this bug, and therefore are in no hurry to fix it.
Unfortunately, if USB-C transfer speeds matter to you, Pixel phones are clearly not your choice. The fact is that at this stage it is not possible to increase the performance in any way, and therefore all that remains for you is either to come to terms with the existing indicators and wait until Google releases an update with a fix, or to bet on Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL. It's a strange thing, but they, unlike the newer models of the same line, have a rather high data transfer speed, at least, if we can say so about a bundle of USB-C 3.0 and UFS 2.1.