Google must commit “billions of dollars” to advertising its future Pixel smartphones and ramping up its distribution network meant to support its growing consumer electronics ambitions, Thomas Husson of Forrester Research was recently quoted as saying. The Vice President and Principal Analyst of the U.S. market research company believes that Alphabet’s subsidiary still isn’t able to directly compete with major original equipment manufacturers in the high-end Android segment, suggesting how its acquisition of some of HTC’s assets and talent is a step in the right direction but not an outright guarantee that all of Google’s upcoming smartphone endeavors are to be massively successful or even just realized at a large scale.
Mr. Husson doesn’t sound convinced that Google is actively seeking to become a major smartphone maker and still sees the Pixel lineup as a spiritual successor to the Nexus series whose main goal was to showcase what Android is capable of achieving in the smartphone space. While Google repeatedly stated the Pixel devices are meant to be a standalone family, the veteran analyst remains adamant that the 2016 handsets and their upcoming follow-ups are still meant to provide OEMs with a benchmark of quality in the context of the Android ecosystem. The original Pixel devices reportedly sold around two million units and were in rather short supply for months after their October 2016 launch, suggesting that Google possibly wasn’t expecting them to be massively commercially successful and in such a high demand. The company also didn’t target too many countries with the Pixel and Pixel XL and may continue with such a strategy moving forward, although the upcoming Pixel 2 series might still record better commercial performance as Google’s general hardware operations continue maturing.
The tech giant is set to officially announce the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL tomorrow, October 4th, with its next hardware event also being expected to see the introduction of the Google Home Mini, a new first-party Chromebook called the Pixelbook, and possibly some other devices. Following the debut of the firm’s next-generation Android flagships, Google may reveal more details on its growing ambitions in the consumer electronics industry and finally explain how exactly does it intend to participate in this segment in the long term.