Google has been looking to up their marketing game with the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones that debuted earlier this month. After they were announced on October 4th, Google put them up for pre-order on their store. Many models and colors have sold out, or are backordered, but that hasn’t kept the search giant from continuing to promote their new smartphones. After spending a boatload of cash on ads and billboards in NYC and London, they are now using a popup on their own homepage to urge people to pre-order a Pixel or Pixel XL smartphone.
It’s a pretty small popup at the bottom of the screen that asks you if you want to learn more about Pixel. You can opt to close it out, or learn more about Pixel. Google is hoping that by promoting this on their home page, a page that garners billions of views each month, it’ll help sell even more smartphones. It just shows Google’s renewed focus on marketing for these two new smartphones that are “Made by Google”.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Pixel and Pixel XL are the first smartphones to be designed inside and out by Google. While Nexus smartphones were mostly designed by their partners. The Pixel is a 5-inch 1080p smartphone with a 2770mAh battery and the Pixel XL has a 5.5-inch QHD display with a 3450mAh battery. Otherwise, the two devices share the same specs. Which include a Snapdragon 821 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB or 128GB of storage, and a 12-megapixel camera on the back side, which Google is claiming is the best camera on a smartphone ever. That’s a pretty bold claim, and many are reserving judgement until the device is in their hands, but it is a pretty amazing camera.
The Pixel will cost you $649, with the Pixel XL starting at $769. To bump up the storage, you’re looking at a $100 upcharge. That means the Pixel with 128GB is $749 and the Pixel XL with 128GB is $869. Google is offering up financing on the Google Store this time around, so you can pay for it over 12 or 24 months, instead of all at once.