Don’t think that because Samsung‘s brand new flagship Galaxy Note8 has been released that there’ll be a dull moment in the mobile tech space. In fact, things are only beginning to heat up as we’ve still got a bunch of big announcements coming up.
And thanks to a popular leakster, we have what appears to be a launch date for one of the most highly anticipated smartphones of 2017 — the Google Pixel 2.
Google’s second-generation Pixel handsets, powered by Snapdragon 836 SoC’s, will be unveiled on October 5th.
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 24, 2017
This juicy bit of information comes courtesy of everyone’s favourite leak artist Evan Blass (@evleaks). According to Evan, the upcoming Google Pixel 2 and Pixel XL 2 will be officially launched on the 5th of October 2017. But that’s not all Evan also says that the Pixel 2 phones will be powered by a Snapdragon 836 processor.
Now we don’t know what the Snapdragon 836 processor is capable of because it hasn’t been officially announced yet, but if the Snapdragon 820 to Snapdragon 821 update is anything to go by, you can expect a marginal performance boost over the current crop of Snapdragon 835 chips. This will likely give the Pixel 2 (or whatever it will be called) a slight edge over the current flagships, even something like the brand new Note8.
However, I doubt the processor spec bump alone will be enough to produce a noticeable difference. Pixel’s performance strengths have always been in their stock Android experience and that will probably still be the case this year especially with the release of Android 8.0 Oreo.
With this new version of Android, Google claims that the original Pixel boots twice as fast than it did on Nougat which in itself is no small feat. So imagine that paired with more capable hardware. Oreo also boasts better efficiency and improved battery life so we’re definitely looking forward to what this 10nm chip will be able to achieve on the upcoming Pixel 2.
According to the current crop of leaks, there will be two Google Pixel 2s this year too. The small one is supposed to come with a 5-inch display while the big XL one is said to sport a larger 6-inch panel.
Despite all the excitement surrounding this device, we are a little disappointed that Google will be leaving out some pretty big features on their upcoming flagship phones — most criminal of which is the omission of the 3.5mm headphone jack. And this is after they made fun of the new iPhone last year.
Either way, all these remain speculation and unconfirmed rumours as nothing official has been announced yet. At least now we have a date to look forward to.
