Beginning in the early 2010s, Samsung and Apple have competed for control of the smartphone market. With the two companies being neck and neck each year with tons of fanboys on each side, they leave little room for any other companies to compete. This past fall, however, Google entered their own phone to change the game.
Google has been talking about entering the phone competition since the Android software was released in 2008 and with the failures of the HTC phone and the Windows phone, they decided to release a phone that could compete with both Apple and Android phones. The Pixel, Google’s newest phone, was made to target both Android and Apple users with a similar physical design to the iPhone and the same software that Android phones use.
“If you’re going to get a new phone, get a Pixel. It’s the best phone on the market right now. Better than mine,” said Benn Otten, junior.
Pixel has many features, including the ability of facetiming with iPhones and Androids called Google Duo. The Pixel’s camera can take 4k photos and videos and has an 89 on the DxOMark Mobile scale which is the highest a smartphone has gotten compared to the iPhone 7, which got a 86, and the Galaxy s7, which got a 87. The phone comes with Google assistant technology built in, the first phone to do so.
The Pixel, with a five inch screen, starts at $650 and the Pixel XL, with a five and a half inch screen, starts at $769 and are expected to sell almost three million by the end of 2016 and another five to six million are projected to sell by the end of the first quarter of 2017. In comparison, 26 million Galaxy s7’s have been sold and Apple has not released sales numbers for the iPhone 7.
Google has never made a phone before. They have licensed their software to other companies such as LG and Samsung so that they could make their own phones. Google commissioned HTC to help build the hardware for the phone. With the Pixel, Google wanted to focus on the AI and make it better than Microsoft’s Cortana or Apple’s Siri.
“My own problem with the Pixel is that it’s the first generation of a phone so that means it could have a lot of problems with it,” said Nick Morris, junior.
A major problem customers are have with the Pixel is that its upper backside is made of glass. This glass part is also where the camera is placed. If someone were to drop the phone, then the glass would most likely break and the camera would too or it would hang out. Either way the camera would be severely broken.
The Pixel is the first generation phone from Google, and so far it has competed fairly sales-wise with Samsung and Apple. It is up to Google if making another generation of the phone is a good choice or not.
