Lately, there's been a lot of news around Google's upcoming smartphones, which are still rumored to be made by HTC this year. Supposedly, Google is moving away from the "Nexus" branding and will be going with "Pixel" with this year's smartphones. With Sailfish being "Pixel" and Marlin being the "Pixel XL". Additionally, these two devices along with a whole host of other hardware, are set to debut on October 4th. Now, the rumor mill is continuing to churn and we now know what camera sensors are being used on the larger smartphone, Marlin.

According to popular leaker, among HTC devices, LlabTooFeR, the HTC Marlin smartphone will be sporting the Sony IMX378 sensor. This is a 12-megapixel camera, which falls right in line with the earlier reports of specs for the device. There's not a whole lot known about this camera sensor just yet, but it likely is a decent upgrade over the IMX278 that was in last year's Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. Those wondering about the front-facing camera, supposedly Marlin will sport the Sony IMX179 sensor. That is an 8-megapixel sensor, again following the recent rumors on specs.

Last year, Google went with a different sensor on their Nexus smartphones. Going with one that had bigger pixels and fewer megapixels. This turned out to be a great decision. As the camera on both the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P were amazing. And still stand tall with flagships from 2016. It's a trend that we began seeing with other smartphones as well. Like Samsung with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy Note 7 this year. Both sport a smaller 12-megapixel camera (when compared with their predecessors), but have larger pixels. The reason for using larger pixels is to allow more light to get into the picture. This is especially useful when you are taking pictures in low-lighting situations.


Since this is a rumor, it's definitely important to still take this all with a grain of salt. Although these rumors do fall in line with the rumors of specs from the past few weeks, the device is still not official, and neither are the specs. However, all should be known, come October 4th, which is about a month away.