The Google Pixel and Pixel XL phones have now been leaked almost in their entirety thanks to Canadian and British retailers. Android Central notes that following on from Bell putting an image of the Pixel on a Galaxy Note 7 page. Noted leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer (@OnLeaks) found that, and promotional blurb. Then The Carphone Warehouse managed to put up its entire product pages.
Specs:
The 5.5-inch screen is a 2560×1440, quad HD model which is protected by Gorilla Glass 4. The specs suggest a 4350mAh battery while the 5-inch model has a 2770mAh battery and a 1920×1080 screen.
Both of the phone have a 12-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front camera. One important point to note is that these are also f/2.0 lenses, which means they won’t let in as much light as Samsung, LG and Apple phones. Where this is the case it’s important to use stabilisation to help keep things blur-free in low-light. Last years Nexus phones had good cameras, let’s hope this is the same here.
Both have the circular fingerprint sensor that we saw introduced on last year’s Nexus 5X and 6P phones. The devices each have 4GB of RAM, which is quite a bit, but Android tends to need more of this than either Windows Phone or iOS devices do.
Even without a leak I could tell you that this phone: won’t have a microSD slot and will have USB-C. These are two things that annoy me greatly. The leak also hints that the two capacities will be 32 and 128GB.
Speedy
The processor is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821. This tells us a few interesting things because of the features that are on offer in the SoC. Audio, for example, can be incredibly quality lossless with 192kHz 24-bit support. The processor is also 4K capable, so while the phones don’t display that resolution, they can output it to an external display.
Don’t forget 4G and Wi-Fi are key points too, and the 821 is quick here too. It’s very likely that Google wants these phones to be the fastest possible at getting you where you want to go online, and having 600mbps potential download speeds over LTE is a big part of that.
Price and popularity
The thing to take away from this is that these phones aren’t quite like the Nexus models in their market placement. Both of these handsets are pretty powerful, so the smaller model isn’t an entry-level device, it’s basically the same apart from battery and resolution. That should put the cost of them close together. That makes me wonder where Google is dropping these phones in terms of retail price.
This is always a problem for hardware companies because as good as most Android phones are, very few of them sell in huge volumes. Samsung dominates the market because it incentivises retailers and spends huge sums on marketing. In the UK there’s a joke that you might go into a shop intending to buy an HTC, but you’ll almost certainly walk out with a Samsung.
Google also has this problem because service providers and retailers both want a little control over the phones they sell – with the exception of the iPhone, which they all accept sells in such numbers that they just do what Apple asks. The Nexus devices have never been as easy to get as a Galaxy phone, and that makes selling them in large numbers difficult because consumers need to know they want one. Perhaps Google will step up with some real ad-spend to get the message out there with the Pixel phones?
Presumably, the Nexus 5X and 6P will continue to be sold. Both are, after all, just a year old and both offer good value and performance, especially for people who don’t want to spend a lot of money on high-end devices. That makes the Pixel phones an interesting proposition, are these two phones going to be priced like the LG G5, or even higher?
This post was originally published by Ian Morris.
