And the funny thing is that they bought HTC mobile, which has always been a competitive and innovative player, and I seriously doubt Taiwan based engineers are paid anywhere close to the ones in Mountain View.
I've had many Nexus and two Pixels (the 5, and 8 now), with an Essential Phone in the middle, hard to beat during the last $220 fire sale.
To me, Google never had a serious hardware strategy. It's improved and keeps improving though, the features getting a lot of focus (like the camera performance) are good, they finally committed to 5 and now 7 years of software updates, the Pixel lineup is sold in an increasing number of countries (Google could still do a much better job here, just sell your hardware ffs). Eventually they'll move to their own in-house SoC, and hopefully Samsung modems won't suck forever.
But when I see something like the Pixel tablet sold at such ridiculous price in most countries, I truly wonder what's going on, it's like some people at Google explicitly want to fail.
I've had many Nexus and two Pixels (the 5, and 8 now), with an Essential Phone in the middle, hard to beat during the last $220 fire sale.
To me, Google never had a serious hardware strategy. It's improved and keeps improving though, the features getting a lot of focus (like the camera performance) are good, they finally committed to 5 and now 7 years of software updates, the Pixel lineup is sold in an increasing number of countries (Google could still do a much better job here, just sell your hardware ffs). Eventually they'll move to their own in-house SoC, and hopefully Samsung modems won't suck forever.
But when I see something like the Pixel tablet sold at such ridiculous price in most countries, I truly wonder what's going on, it's like some people at Google explicitly want to fail.