NEW YORK—Google announced the Pixel 3 at its event in NYC today. With something like two dozen different leaks and an entire lost box of devices that went up for sale on the black market, the Pixel 3 is probably the most-leaked smartphone of all time.
The mostly metal backs of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 1 were one of the few unique hardware features of the Pixel line. Now the Pixel 3 is just another fragile glass phone, which feels like a downgrade. The back panel still has a two-tone look thanks to two different treatments on a single glass sheet. The top is normal glass, while the bottom has a matte coating on it.
As expected, Google is releasing two different devices with totally different front designs. The Pixel 3 has a 5.5-inch 2160 x 1080 OLED display with sizable, straight bezels on the top and bottom of the phone. The Pixel 3 XL has a 6.3-inch 2880 x 1440 OLED display with an extremely tall display notch and a large bottom bezel.
Google is still only using a single camera lens on the back this year, but the Pixel line has never disappointed in the camera department. Google's cameras have topped the competition for some time thanks to "computational photography"—an approach that aims to make up for the limited lens size of smartphone cameras with algorithms and computing power.
One of the new features, dubbed Top Shot, picks out the best shot after taking a burst of photos. When you snap a photo on either the Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL, a bunch of photos are taken in rapid succession. Top Shot recognizes the best of all those shots—the ones where your subject's eyes aren't closed and the ones that are the least blurry.
This news is developing. We'll update this post as more details become available. Follow our liveblog for the most up to date news.
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Ars Technica
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