Pre-orders for the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL Android flagships were two times larger compared to the figures reached by the original Pixel and Pixel XL last year, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai revealed during Alphabet’s earnings call with investors and analysts held on Thursday, shortly after the Mountain View, California-based tech giant posted what it deems were “terrific” results in the third quarter of the year. Mr. Pichai didn’t elaborate on the matter, nor did he reveal the number of pre-orders for the company’s smartphones last year, though most industry trackers put their lifetime sales at around two million, suggesting that the Pixel and Pixel XL possibly achieved a six-figure pre-order milestone in 2016.
The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are advertised even more aggressively than their predecessors were and are being manufactured in larger numbers, with Google CEO confirming that the tech giant has been hard at work scaling its smartphone business over the course of this year. New retail partnerships and expanded global availability are both part of that strategy that’s expected to continue in the long term, though the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are still likely to be in short supply over the coming months. Despite some reports about quality control issues and defective units, Google’s new smartphones have been widely praised by critics and consumers alike as some of the best Android devices ever created. The handsets are presently available for purchase in the United States, with Google’s 2017 smartphone efforts also encompassing the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, India, and a number of other markets around the world.
The Pixel 2 lineup starts at approximately $650, depending on the market, with the two smartphones primarily differing in terms of design; the smaller Pixel 2 features a 5-inch AMOLED screen with a conventional aspect ratio of 16:9 and regularly sized bezels, whereas the Pixel 2 XL comes with a 6-inch POLED panel with a tall 18:9 image format and a more bezel-free aesthetic. Both are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC and 4GB of RAM, in addition to offering 64GB or 128GB of internal flash memory and what’s considered to be one of the best mobile cameras to date which relies on a single 12.2-megapixel sensor.