After weeks of teases, rumors and detailed leaks over the weekend, Google officially announced its new flagship Pixel smartphone in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The Pixels are Google’s new brand of premium Android smartphones and are available exclusively on Verizon in the U.S. Advance leaks predicted the Pixel has a 5-inch full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display and a larger phone, the Pixel XL, has a 5.5-inch Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440) screen.
The Pixel starts at $649 for the full price or at $27 per month. It’ll come in three colors: “Quite Black”, “Really Blue”, and “Very Silver”.
It’ll also be available internationally from the following carriers and retailers:
Pre-orders start immediately in the U.S., Canada, Germany and the UK. Indians will have to wait until Oct. 13 to pre-order.
The Pixel phones are the latest to run Android Nougat (version 7.1), the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system.
The Nexus phones started receiving Android 7.0 Nougat in August. LG’s V20 was the first Android phone to ship with Nougat.
Screen and battery capacity differences aside (Pixel has a 2,770 mAh battery and the Pixel XL has a 3,450 mAh battery), the two phones are identical.
They’re both powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor with 4GB of RAM and come with 32GB or 128GB of internal storage (there’s no microSD card slot for expansion).
Both phones have a 12.3-megapixel f/2.0 aperture camera on the back with optical image stabilization and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera on the front. The camera also stabilizes video by default thanks to optical image stabilization.
Google says the cameras have zero shutter lag and scored an 89, the highest DxO camera rating for any smartphone camera.
