The Pixel 2 phones are meant for an AI-first world

Among all the smartphones I review and use, there’s one that stands out as being as smooth as molasses a whole year after it launched. That would be the Pixel. Not a hint of slowing down, not a stutter or a hiccup — it just runs as fast as the day it arrived. But it cost me a pretty penny, and the new Pixels will cost a prettier penny when they arrive in India. So pretty, in fact, that I will give them a miss despite the wonderful camera that seems to have gotten itself a score of 98 from DxOMark who evaluate cameras, beating the iPhone 8 Plus and Galaxy Note 8 to become the best camera phone.

The first gen Pixels were no bestsellers, except with techies, because they were so very expensive and had a few things missing, including a riveting design. And now it looks like the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL will be headed the same way because they cost a staggering ₹61,000 and ₹70,000 for the 64 GB and 128 GB variants of the Pixel 2 and ₹73,000 and ₹82,000 for the 64 GB and 128 GB versions for the Pixel 2 XL.

Now it’s true that the iPhones all also command a high price, but the Pixels, in comparison, come with neither a design that everyone copies, nor an ecosystem of unbeatable apps and a following that’s been built over years. Last year everyone’s reaction to the Pixels and their price tag was “Why would I just not buy an iPhone?” Valid question.

But as Google’s Sundar Pichai took the stage in what was a very Apple-ised presentation, he set out Google’s vision for the Pixels and a growing number of related products as being all about artificial intelligence and personalisation through machine learning. It’s an AI-first world, he said, and effectively that means stop looking at a smartphone as being all about hardware and design. The Pixel phones come in three colours with amusing names like Clearly White (clearly a dig at Apple’s names for the colours of some of its iPhones) Just Black and Kinda Blue, which you can safely bet will not come to India.

The top segment on the back is glassy like the older Pixels. There’s one version that is Panda coloured, meaning that it’s black and white and looks very unusual. Still, the design is unlikely to be enough to lure mass customers.

When the first Pixels launched, the Google Assistant, able to answer all sorts of questions at top speed, was exclusive to the new phones and along with the camera, was the reason I decided to put down my money for the smaller variant.

But before you knew it, the Assistant has made it to most Android phones, in some cases to begin with, and in others now downloadable as an app. In fact, even iPhone users can get it on the App Store.

Google actually has little choice but to spread its software services across as many Android devices as it can because that’s the game the company has always been in. A sort of world domination. The Assistant can be triggered with a squeeze to the phone’s edges, a nice gimmick that appeared on the HTC flagship this year. The Assistant is even built into the Pixel Buds, a set of wireless earphones that are an optional accessory with the new phones. The Pixel 2s will not only come with Android Oreo — that goes without saying — but will get upgrades to the next OS and security updates before everyone else and for certain.

That leaves the camera. My Pixel’s camera has rarely let me down. It’s never blurred, always bright, and hardly messes up. But it does change up certain colours and has an overall software-tricks feel about it. I suppose this is fine because there’s a limit to how capable a camera one can put on a phone without changing the size. This time the camera is thought to be a big leap over the previous, without being a dual-camera set up, and both versions have the same camera. It will also enable the use of Google Lens, the object recognition application. AR is also used with the camera in a similar way to Apple’s implantation.

The new Pixel phones lack the 3.5 mm headphone jack, a preoccupation with users ever since Apple removed it from the iPhone 7s. In the case of the Pixel 2 XL, the thin bezels on the phone get some more space because of this, but on the Pixel 2, the bezels are much as they’ve been on other phones.

Phone design has reached quite a saturation point when it comes to hardware. Google is right when it says that it’s the software and what it can do with the hardware given that it will be the future of smartphones, but paradoxically, that future isn’t quite here yet and users are not about to spend an enormous amount for something that hasn’t become necessary. Still, you never know whether the Pixel package will win over users this time.