A Cheaper Google Pixel on the Way?

Think the Google Pixel 2 and Google Pixel 2 XL are too expensive? Want a similar Google-ified experience at a fraction of the price? If you’re yearning for the days of a cheaper Google Pixel phone, your prayers may soon be answered as the company is apparently working on a mid-range smartphone for way less than its flagships.

Apparently, Google parent company Alphabet is looking to really expand into emerging markets like India, reports Economic Times. This includes products we already know like the Google Home smart speakers andt he Pixelbook laptop, but they want to make a bigger push with smartphones too.

While this cheaper Google Pixel won’t be anywhere near as cheap as Android Go smartphones, which are generally $100 or less, it should also be considerably less than the regular Pixel 2. The latter starts at around $650 US and $899 Canadian. The assumption is that this mid-range phone would fall somewhere in between.

Understandably, there’s not much floating around in terms of actual specs, but we can likely expect the new phone to rocking something in the Snapdragon 600 family (maybe a Snapdragon 660) with somewhere between 1GB and 4GB of RAM. The report goes on to say that the cheaper Pixel phone, or whatever it ends up being called, will launch in the summer, just before they show off the Pixel 3 in the fall.

That’s the good news. The bad news, at least for us here in North America, is that Google/Alphabet could be gearing the phone strictly toward India and other emerging markets. Whether or not it’ll eventually float through over to our side of the Pacific remains to be seen. Would you want a mid-range Pixel?