Google have officially moved away from the Nexus brand. Previously the company would pick a manufacturer to put together their device, but no more and have now moved to making their own smartphone entirely. Using the same Pixel brand we have seen before, the new Pixel and Pixel XL are Google’s first official Smartphones.
The Pixel and Pixel XL are mostly the same device, with the obvious difference being size. The standard Pixel will include a 5-inch 1080p MOLED display and the larger Pixel XL rocking a 5.5-inch AMOLED display with 1440p resolution. The Pixel XL will also include a larger battery at 3450 mAh, with its little brother having only 2770 mAh.
The design of the device is advertised as an Aluminium unibody with polished glass combination. The design seems pretty straight forward, and nothing we haven’t really seen before. The Pixel measures 143.8 x 69.5 x 8.5 mm, with the Pixel XL being obviously larger at 154.7 x 75.7 x 8.5 mm.
Inside the devices we have the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chipset with Adreno 530 GPU and 4GB of RAM. Google are putting a lot of effort in the camera for their first device and have already touted it as being the best smartphone camera. The sensor is 12MP with f/2.0 aperture and 1.55µm pixel size and uses both Laser and Phase detection for fast auto focusing.
Other specs include an 8MP front facing camera, USB type-C connection, Bluetooth 4.2, WiFI B/G/N/AC, and internal storage is 32GB or 128GB. Sadly no MicroSD card slot avaialble. We also have a headphone hack, just in case anyone was concerned.
Another big push for the devices will be the inclusion of Android 7.1, with Google also stating the smartphones to be the first with Google AI Assistant, and how it’s a big part of the phones design.
The new devices are already avaialble for pre-order with the sim-free versions starting at $649/£599.99 for the 32GB Pixel, and ranging up to $869/£819.99 for the Pixel XL 128GB.
