Eight months on the Google Pixel and Pixel XL are still widely regarded as the smoothest, fastest Android experience available. Eight months on though means one thing, we are only a few short months away from the next iteration of the Google Pixel.
As 2017 is the year of the leak it would seem likely that we are going to start to see a lot more leaks on top of what we have already seen. We have seen three devices originally rumoured before we heard that one of them was cancelled leaving the “Walleye” and “Taimen”. The Walleye is apparently being manufactured by HTC and the Taimen by LG.
Today XDA Developers have obtained information from a source who has become familiar with the Pixel 2 software and are actually confident in the accuracy of the details provided and at this late stage are unlikely to change. Read below to see them:
Taimen
The Taimen is the larger of the two devices and is rumoured to be manufactured by LG although this leak we saw suggesting that may mean that just the display itself is manufactured by LG, after all we did see Google invest heavily in LG display OLED production lines.
The display itself is apparently a 5.99 inch 1440P OLED display which has been manufactured by LG. There is no mention of the display ratio although there was mention that the bezels on the phone are smaller than they wer for last year’s Pixel phones. There is a 128GB version but there may well be other storage options. In what is NOT a surprise, the processor will be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 clocked at the reference frequency of 2.45GHz.
The design of the Pixels Gen 1 is polarising and looks set to be very similar next year although the glass window is located near the top of the device and no longer houses the fingerprint sensor. The glass top does house the single lens camera though along with the dual LED flash.
Walleye
The Walleye is the smaller Pixel device apparently manufactured by HTC. Unfortunately, with HTC come bezels and the design is said to be nearly identical to the original Pixel including the massive oversized bezels. Inside these bezels will be a 4.97 inch FHD display — disappointing. In further disturbing news Google is apparently planning on doing away with the headphone jack and replacing it with stereo speakers.
The Walleye will also be sporting a Snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM with a 64GB storage option.
Pixel > Nexus?
Other news the XDA Developer source provided was that inside the software for these two devices the Taimen uses the name Nexus Imprint (that’s what Google called the fingerprint sensor software in the Nexus devices) while the Walleye referred to it as Pixel Imprint. This may just be a hangover from the last time LG made a phone for Google — lets hope that the Taimen is received a lot better (and is a better phone) than the Nexus 5X was.
After Google made such a hit with the Pixel devices last year I find it very disappointing in these leaks. The bezels on the Pixels are far too large and the only devices that need these sized bezels are those with a fingerprint sensor on the front. To go down the same path shows a poor design skill in my opinion. The best looking devices this year are the LG G6 and the Samsung Galaxy S8 and guess what? They have tiny bezels.
Every single flagship (aside from the Galaxy S8) this year is including dual rear cameras — some more successfully than others. For Google not to include it may be a mistake — even Samsung are apparently jumping on the dual camera bandwagon, including them in the Galaxy Note 8.
How do you feel about these specifications? Are you disappointed? What do you think about the lack of a dual camera? Is the dual camera hype just a gimmick and everyone just does it because everyone else does? How do you feel about the smaller Pixel 2 having humongous bezels again? What about that headphone jack?
