Did you know the Pixel Watch 2 was going to have UWB? Or that the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro would have higher clockspeeds? How about 8K video recording and 480fps slow-mo?
Kamila Wojciechowska and Mishaal Rahman, two of the foremost Android code sleuths, found all of the above and more. Every company’s phones tend to leak these days, but Google is batting some kind of record.
Not the Vegas one... the photo spheres that Google used to let you capture. They’ve been removed as a feature from the latest Pixels.
I’m told by reliable sources that I am the only person who ever used this feature. But I am here to insist: it was a good feature! Photo Spheres were a delightful way to step back into a space and time. I guess we’re back to taking really stretchy panoramas.
[Android Authority]
Pixel 8 reviews are live! So is the Pixel Watch 2 review! AI and cameras and Fitbit everywhere you look. We talked through them both, and then tried to figure out what to make of the new Chromebook Plus designation. Google gadgets: still here, and getting kind of good. Emphasis on kind of.
These might just be the Pixel phones we’ve been waiting for, but it all depends on how much trust you’re willing to put into Google.
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Google’s addressed a lot of what annoyed me about the first Pixel Watch, but repairability and continued Fitbit integration are still question marks.
We tried to talk about gadgets, but ended up talking about the ethics of photography and why, as Nilay put it, “the market won’t correct for truth.” When does a photo become... something else? It’s a complicated question for a brand-new phone. We have some thoughts.
IDC VP Francisco Jeronimo posted this week that Google has sold 37.9 million Pixel phones globally since 2016. 9to5Google did some math concluding that the company sold about 10 million of them in the last 12 months — an improvement over its 2019 best of 7.2 million.
That’s progress, but then again, Apple and Samsung each shipped hundreds of millions of phones last year, so those new Pixel 8 phones have a lot of ground to make up.
