Google made waves with the recent launch of its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro on September 5th, and they are poised to hit the Indian market next week. In a flashback to February, when we provided an exclusive peek at the Google Pixel 8 Pro, our insights proved spot on. Now, we have the …
I want this. I switched from using iPhone my entire life to GrapheneOS. Now that I've come to appreciate Android I'm amazed at the wide variety of Android phones to choose from but I'm stuck to Pixels because that's the only option for GrapheneOS currently.
Yup. My 4a is depreciated now, and all the new Pixels are over 6". I wish there were 5 to 5.5" phones that had any sort of power. The Xperia X Compact was perfect.
For the past few months if people were to say the P8 leaks were from Google to drive up hype, I would have believed them. But at this point, I just convinced that Google is just plain incompetent in keeping products under cover.
P8 and P8P are on preorder now, and Google would very much want all the hype and leaks to point to their upcoming higher-priced products to drive up preorder sales, and not a lower-priced product that would not be coming out yet in months, and may or may not be competing with the base model P8 for its value after the review embargo for the P8 drops. Putting out leaks intentionally for the P8a is just stupid at this point and time imo. Can anyone convince me why this would be a good idea?
I can't come up with a good explanation. But do we know how much Google cares about hardware sales and their promotion?
The main product they sell in the smartphone market is not hardware, but android. And through that the integration of their other services.
To me the pixel phones serve as a guide where they want the ecosystem to move towards, but at the same time are direct competition for their customers (the other manufacturers such as Samsung). Similar to Microsoft and their surface line
Microsoft and the Surface line is not a great comparison imo, since their hardware specs aren't exactly unique, and every feature Windows has on Surface is the exact same on other brand laptops; while Pixel devices have Android features exclusive to them and not on any other Android phones.
If Google wants to sell Android/Google services and not just Pixel, wouldn't it be better to trickle down more features to mainline Android? Currently, the only previously Pixel-exclusive feature that is now available on any Google One subscription (that I know of) is Magic Eraser. Plus, Google now developing their own SoC and promising 7 years of software support for their hardware, means that they probably do care about hardware. (And we all know where Google products end up if they don't care enough about it)
Though admittedly I'm not a business analyzer, and I still need to sit on this question a bit to conclude my thoughts (problems include how Google would be able to put Pixel features into the hands of other phone manufacturers to improve Android). Appreciate the answer anyways.
Or they just want to keep the attention to Pixel product, any pixel. These little leaks doing rounds and rounds in tech sites mean more exposure to Pixels.
Yeah, but my point was about the timing. P8 just launched, and review embargo is dropping in a few days, everyone's eyes are on the Pixel already. Samsung S23 FE launched on the same day and no one gives a shit. Leaks for P8a right now are just not productive compared to leaks about the performance, camera quality, etc on the P8/P8P.