



























SAN FRANCISCO—Google just unleashed a whopping five hardware products today, and I spent plenty of time trying them. The first and most important release is the Google Pixel, Google's new flagship smartphones.

At $649 for the Pixel and $769 for the Pixel XL, Google is charging a lot more for the Pixel than it has for the Nexus devices. It's attacking the premium end of the market, and these definitely seem like premium phones. In fact, they remind me a lot of one particular premium smartphone—the iPhone.

I say that both as a complaint and a compliment. Both phones are extremely well made, with the aluminum back, glass rear window, and glass front forming a shell that really feels like it's worth the price tag. The design is also extremely derivative, to the point that I almost picked up someone's iPhone on a display table thinking it was a Pixel.

The iPhone and Pixel share similar bezel sizes, but the iPhone has the excuse of having a hardware home button. Nothing takes up this vast amount of space on the front of the Pixel. The only unique part of the design is the glass window on the rear, which both allows RF signals to escape and serves as the camera lens.

You will find a minor change to the iPhone design on the sides, which starts as a rounded edge on the Pixel but is interrupted by a bezel around the perimeter of the back (like the HTC 10). This is an HTC-made device by the way, which Google will freely admit if you ask.

At least with the higher price tag comes a set of top-tier specs. The highlight is probably the storage solution, which uses UFS 2.0. We didn't have a chance to run a storage benchmark, but hopefully they'll be somewhere near the speed of high-end Samsung phones. The days of Google phones having slow storage should be over.

The Pixel phones will be one of the first devices to run the Snapdragon 821 SoC, which has a top speed of 2.4Ghz but Google chose to clock the chip back down to 2.15GHz. This makes it just a minor revision to the 820.













The best reason to buy a Pixel might actually be the software. Google is keeping the Google Assistant exclusive to the Pixel phones, at least for now. Long pressing on the home button activates the Assistant, which will pop up and answer questions. On a phone it looks a lot like it does on Google Allo, showing a chat-style interface that contains your questions along with the results.

There are smart reply responses that allow you to drill down on the result, too. For instance, saying "show me restaurants nearby" will show a carousel with results, and then "Italian," "Chinese" and other restaurant types will be shown as smart reply options.

This is also the first device to launch with Android 7.1. The new build of Android (still called Nougat) is mostly a collection of minor APIs that enable Pixel features. There are things like a "Shortcut launcher API" which can somewhat replicate Apple's 3D Touch on the home screen, but as far as we know this doesn't work yet. There's also "Night Light" mode (which turns the UI brown), circular icon support, and support for fingerprint scanner gestures. Some improvements to existing Android 7.0 features are included, like Seamless Updates and Daydream VR.

There are tons of aesthetic changes on top of this, like solid white System UI buttons, circular home screen icons, and a redesigned settings app. Inside the settings app is a "support" tab that offers a 24/7 link to Google support. A new "screen share" option even allows support to see your device.

We'll need a lot more time to test out the camera properly, but Google promises this will be one of the best cameras on the market. The camera app did start-up very fast, but we'll have to see how consistent that is after more usage.

At first blush, the hardware is fine. It's just so much like an iPhone that it doesn't even seem "new." It lacks excitement and identity. The software looks interesting though, and I look forward to digging in for a full review. But no matter what, Google's update speed automatically makes this one of the best Android devices currently available.