Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Looking Back at the Original Pixel ⭐

I’ve been rewatching this year’s Made by Google event for fairly obvious reasons, and the video starts with a montage of all nine previous Pixel phone generations stretching back to 2016. There’s also a nice bit early on in which Google senior vice president Rick Osterloh is reminded of his appearance at the original Pixel launch almost a decade earlier.

Each time I see this, I think about how Pixel has evolved from year-to-year. And while I have some specific memories and many more vague memories, I don’t exactly recall when many features or changes arrived for the first time. And so I’ve wondered about the best way to assemble this information in an easily-accessible way.

I could do this for myself, and just take notes in Notion or whatever. Or, better still, I could do it publicly, in the form of articles like this one that I publish to Thurrott.com. And if some of the history I needed to reexamine had occurred before I made the switch to Thurrott.com, I would need to root around in my archives and possibly republish some older articles here.

But I started Thurrott.com with George and Blue Whale Web in early 2015, and Google announced the first Pixels in 2016. So the entire history of Pixel is documented, to some degree, on this site. There’s no reason to republish anything. I can simply simply link to it.

So that’s part of what I’m doing. And here’s part one.

? The Nexus of hardware and software

Previous to designing the Pixel smartphones in-house, Google worked with its hardware partners on annual Nexus-branded smartphone releases that it sold directly to a small but ardent community of fans. I was one of those fans, and I purchased almost every Nexus model that Google created, with the Nexus 4 (2012) and Nexus 5 (2013) being notably good early entries.

I skipped the Nexus 6, which I viewed as a rare miss for the company, in part because I wasn’t impressed by the Motorola hardware. But then Google rebounded in 2015 with the best-ever Nexus phones, the 5.2-inch Nexus 5X and the 5.7-inch Nexus 6P, the first and only time it ever announced and shipped two Nexus models at the same time. The Nexus 6P was particularly impressive, thanks largely to its incredible camera capabilities. It represented a few personal firsts, including my first exposure to Huawei hardware, my first experiences with Google Fi as a wireless carrier. (It was still called Project Fi at the time.) And looking back on this device now, I will also point out that the 6P featured a phone-wide camera bar that previewed the iconic camera bars on today’s Pixels.

And then it was over.

Though Nexus phones were often excellent, dealing with a different hardware maker every year was problematic for many reasons. For example, it was impossible to align new features each year with hardware designs that often took 2 to 4 years to create. And Google’s partners would sometimes release slightly better versions of the phones that Google offered. Eventually, Google was forced to switch strategies, and so it dropped Nexus, hired 2000 people from phone maker HTC, and began working on what would become the first Pixel phones. (The Pixel name was originally used with the Chromebook Pixel that Google had released in 2013, so there are some interesting parallels with Microsoft and its Surface brand.)

? 2016

In September 2016, Apple announced the iPhone 7 Plus, the first iPhone with two rear camera lenses, optical zoom (albeit just 2x), and a computational photography-based portrait mode feature (that arrived two months later in beta). This was the third year in a row in which the company introduced two iPhone models with different screen sizes. As before, the larger iPhone was differentiated with unique hardware and software features, but the bigger change many might recall is that the iPhone 7 family was the first to drop the headphone jack.

One month later, Google announced its first-ever Pixel smartphones alongside a Google Home smart speaker, Google Wi-Fi mesh wireless networking hardware, the 4K-capable Chromecast Ultra, and the Daydream VR headset. There were two Pixel models, the 5-inch Pixel ($650 and up) and the 5.5-inch Pixel XL ($770 and up), and they closely followed the iPhone look and feel, not to mention Apple’s two model go-to-market strategy.

Much was made—by Google and a surprisingly guileless press—about Pixel being Google’s “first” smartphones, but the first Pixel generation were HTC designs, as was the smaller of the two Pixels that Google would announce a year later. The debate around this became more and more pedantic as the years went by, but it’s fair to say that this was a multi-year transition. And while there were so many ups and downs over the subsequent decade, let’s not skip ahead quite yet.

? OG Pixel

Aside from their curiously iPhone-like designs, the first Pixels provided high-end hardware for the day, including a quad-core 2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, 4 GB of RAM, 32 or 128 GB of storage, a 12.3 MP rear-facing camera, and an 8 MP front-facing camera. The Pixel XL provided a 5.5-inch AMOLED display running at 2560 x 1440, whereas the 5-inch Pixel featured a 1080p AMOLED display.

But here are some curiosities that were lost to time: The camera hardware in both Pixels lacked optical image processing capabilities and optical zoom at a time in which its competitors—Apple and Samsung, mostly—were starting to offer these features in their flagship phones. The storage was non-expandable in an age in which SD card slots were common in Android phones. And the two phones had a single mono speaker.

I was mostly concerned about the pricing. Except for the Nexus 6, Google priced its Nexus handsets quite reasonably and well below the prices of its competition. With the Pixel, Google seemed to be mimicking iPhone pricing, too, and these phones were almost $300 more expensive than their respective Nexus predecessors.

One fun touch with a modern echo: The Pixel and Pixel XL didn’t have a camera bump or bar like the Nexus 6P, but they did debut with a limited edition Very Blue color, shown above, that’s quite similar to the Indigo color that’s available on the base Pixel 10 today.

I ordered a Pixel XL, and it’s amusing today to look back at all the cables and little hardware bits that came with it in the box: There was a USB-C to USB-A cable, a UBC-C to USB-C cable, a USB-C power adapter, and a USB-C to USB-A dongle. It had a Spartan and minimalist Android 7.1-based skin that is the inspiration for today’s mistaken belief that Pixel Android is somehow “stock” Android, when it’s since become the most highly-customized Android version in the market.

? Seeing the launch with fresh eyes

It’s interesting to go back and watch the original Pixel announcement from the Made event in late 2016 and consider what Google said and did while referencing the subsequent history.

? Familiar faces

The event began with Sundar Pichai, who had become the CEO of Google just a year earlier and is today the CEO of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

Then we got our first peek at Rick Osterloh, who is the senior vice president of devices and services at Google today and oversees Android, Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit. He was previously the president at Motorola Mobility and the team he oversaw in 2016 was largely made up of former HTC employees tasked with building the first Pixels.

Brian Rakowski discussed Google Assistant and the Pixel’s photo features at the event, noting that he led the Pixel product management team. And he still does: After two years as director of product management, Rakowski has been a vice president of Pixel since 2011.

Sabrina Ellis was a vice president of product management at Google from 2011 to 2023, where she worked alongside Rakowski. She went on to spend one year as Chief Product Officer at Pinterest and is now a board member at Asurion.

?️ Teasing the future

Say what you will about Google, but the messaging has been quite consistent over the years, and it was talking up AI—often framed as machine learning, or ML, in that era—very early on. Pichar and Osterloh come off especially well given the subsequent years and the AI-based innovations to come.

♟️ Positioning

Pichai started the event by framing what Google was doing in the context of history. Computing has always had big shifts every 10 years or so, he said, referencing the PC in the 1980s, the web in the 1990s (“the biggest platform shift of our lifetimes”), and the iPhone-based mobile revolution of the mid-2000s. But the next shift would be all about AI.

“It’s clear that we are heading from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world,” Pichai said. He talked about people interacting with technology more naturally and seamlessly than ever before. Above all else, he said, AI will be integrated and will help users in more meaningful ways.

Google had introduced its Google Assistant at Google I/O earlier that year, promoting it as a universal digital assistant that would always be available when needed. Google Assistant was “a personal Google for every user,” he said, “an individual Google,” “a Google for your world.” You could ask it what you needed and have a conversation with it. Google Assistant was safe and secure, and it would get better over time as you used it. But the key was getting it in front of users. And so the Google Assistant would “soon be available from all kinds of places.” As he said that, icons for a phone, smart speaker, watch, car, and TV appeared on-screen behind him.

?️ ML and AI

Pichai also reminded the audience that Google was already at the forefront of AI research and implementation. It had a knowledge graph with over “70 billion facts,” and state of the art machine translation, image recognition, and voice recognition systems. Thanks to ML and AI, Google was starting to put these advances into its products, too. Google Photos benefitted from image processing capabilities that helped it recognize things in images. Google Translate was moving from phrase translations to far more accurate sentence translations that approached human-level accuracy. And Google Assistant was taking advantage of text-to-speech capabilities that allowed it speak answers back to users in natural voices.

That last bit was possible thanks to a new DeepMind “model”—then an unusual term–that gave Assistant multiple voices, personalities, and languages. One day, Pichai said, it even have emotions.

? Hardware + software + AI

When Pichai finished up, he introduced Osterloh, who immediately referenced Apple twice while also explaining how Google would exceed what that company had done. Instead of “1,000 songs in your pocket,” he said, people now expected “the entire world’s music collection in your pocket.” But his most Apple-like comments were also his most prophetic.

“We believe that the next big innovation is going to take place at the intersection of hardware and software, with AI at the center,” he said.

It is fascinating that the third bit of that equation, AI, is still a major differentiator and advantage for Google, especially given the past year of Apple floundering aimlessly with Apple Intelligence.

Apple often speaks of the virtuous cycle of building hardware and software together as part of the vertical integration strategy started by Steve Jobs. But is was important to Google, too. The problem was that the previous, Microsoft-like partnering strategy that led to Nexus was problematic and inefficient. And so with Pixel, Google—like Microsoft with Surface—switched to a more Apple-like approach.

Given how much the world has changed since 2016, it’s a little strange that the first manifestation of this “innovation a the intersection of hardware, software, and AI” was Google Assistant. The new Pixel phones and the Google Home smart speaker that Google would announce later in the show , Osterloh said, would be “hardware with the Google Assistant at [their] core.”

? The very best of Google

Google has adopted some interesting language over the past several years. For example, it often describes Pixel as “the helpful phone” as a friendly way to communicate the power of its AI and other Pixel-specific features. But at Made for Google 2016, Osterloh delivered the first rendition of a line we would hear more than any other in subsequent years.

“We have the opportunity to bring people the best of Google as we intended it,” he said. This is perhaps the simplest way to express the point of Pixel as a platform. Which, as noted above, spans hardware, software, and AI.

“Hardware isn’t new for Google,” Osterloh said, “but now we’re taking steps to showcase the very best of Google across a family of devices designed and built by us. This is a natural step and we’re in it for the long run.”

? Pixel and Pixel XL

Osterloh then moved on to the Pixel phones, new phones “made by Google.” The Pixel brand had always represented the best of hardware, designed and built by Google.

Phones are “the most important device we own,” he added, explaining that his team—and, by extension, Google—designed everything about the Pixel, from the hardware to the user experience to be simple and easy to use.

To me, these phones still look painfully and overtly similar to the iPhones of that era, but the first Pixels also provided us with our first look at Google trying to differentiate with design. The upper-third of the device’s back was glass, while the rest was polished aluminum, and the resulting two-tone look was perhaps its one unique design element.

“And there’s no unsightly camera bump,” he said in his third overt Apple reference. Which is retroactively humorous today given that the biggest design differentiator on modern Pixels is an enormous camera bar.

If the design was an afterthought, and it still feels like one, that may be because Google had bigger mountains to conquer.

“What really makes it come to life is how the hardware and software work together,” he said. “It’s the perfect example of how the best of Google’s smarts combines to make a great, simple user experience.”

And then he launched into a list of 5 things that made those words real. Pixel would be the first phone with Google Assistant built-in. It would offer a “terrific” photography experience. It would leverage Google Cloud to handle the storage of those photos. It would offer cross-platform communications capabilities. And it was “made for mobile virtual reality.”

Only the last of those five points hasn’t aged well, but maybe that’s premature given Google’s plans to release Android XR this year.

?️ Google Assistant + Pixel

Brian Rakowski then came out to discuss most of those five points. And so he started by noting that Google designed Pixel to be simple and smart inside and out. And that its Pixel launcher played a key role in that with a clean, polished look, round icons, and, wait for it, Google Assistant integration.

Looking back on this now, the Google Assistant portion of the event is surprisingly strong. From an interaction perspective, you could access Google Assistant by saying “Hey Google” out loud or by pressing and holding—long-pressing on the on-screen Home button. This was before gesture-based navigation, so Pixels and other Android phones had three on-screen navigation buttons for Back, Home, and App Switching.

The Google Assistant demos are impressive even today. Rakowski starts off with a few basic interactions, like calling up a specific search in Google Photos by saying “Show me photos from last October” to Google Assistant. And noting that this type of thing would work for people, places, and other things, too.

But the complicated, multi-step conversation he has about getting concert tickets and then a dinner reservation for him and his wife was so good the audience broke out into applause multiple times. He asks for upcoming events at a nearby music venue and gets a plain English response whose answers were provided by the Google knowledge graph. He asks to play a recent song by one of the groups that will be there, and Google Assistant opens YouTube because it knows Rakowski prefers that app.

But then he texts his wife and she suggests dinner reservations. And this is perhaps the most futuristic bit: Rakowski presses and holds on the system Home button while in the messaging app and then swipes up to instruct Assistant to interact with what’s on the screen. It recognized the restaurant name, provided cards of information about that place, each with links to various apps, and then he chose Maps to make sure it was close enough to the music venue. So he tells Assistant to make the reservation, which it does for two people at whatever time, and then tells him he’ll get a confirmation from OpenTable via email.

Google and other companies working on AI now are pushing very similar interactions, and if you’re familiar with Magic Cue, you can see the modern successor to this functionality.

? Camera

Given how impressive the Nexus 6P was for photos, it is not surprising that Pixel continued this tradition and really ran with it. Noting that Google had “photography gurus and image processing experts on the team” who had worked on the entire camera stack for over a year, Rakowski then introduced most of us to DXOMark for the first time and issued a fun surprise: The OG Pixel had just received that company’s highest-ever smartphone camera rating.

The specifications of the single camera lens were impressive for the day, but the phone’s best photo features were all software-based. Channeling the future, Rakowski said that Pixel had “incredible on-device software algorithms that do things you can’t do with great hardware alone.” And then he listed several unique features proving that point: Smart Burst (with “Google Intelligence” choosing the best photo from a sequence of shots), HDR+, and impressive video stabilization.

The first Pixels came with the Google Photos app built-in, of course, But they also provided unlimited online storage for photos and videos at original quality. (Until they didn’t. This feature eventually became too expensive for Google to continue using.) “You will never run out of space,” Rakowski said as a familiar screenshot of an iPhone with a “Storage Full” warning appeared on-screen behind him.

?️ But wait, there’s more

Sabrina Ellis was up next and she went through several other unique Pixel features, the first of which was tied to the cross-platform communications issue that was noted earlier. When we think about this type of problem today, the discussion is about iMessage and RCS messaging. But back then, Google was creating custom messaging apps for both Android and iOS, and that was how it got around Apple’s walled garden. And so she showed off the Google Duo video calling app, which featured a Knock-Knock feature with a live video feed of the person calling you before you pick up.

From there, Ellis picked up the pace a bit. Pixel could get 7 hours of battery charge in just 15 minutes. It came with the then-newest Android version, Nougat, which dramatically improved how system updates worked. The Pixels came with “24/7 live customer care built into the phone,” along with chat and screen share options. There was a data transfer app for other phones, including iPhones, so you could quickly move over your contacts, photos, music, videos, calendar, text messages, and even iMessages. New cases, live cases, and other accessories.

One of the things I really liked about Pixel at first stands out today, too: There were two models, each with different screen sizes, but they were otherwise identical. You just had a choice between a regular sized screen and a large screen. There were three colors, with Googly names—Quite Black, Very Silver, and the limited edition Really Blue—and Google was expanding availability to Verizon in the U.S. and to international partners.

After that, Clay Bavor came out to demonstrate and discuss Daydream VR and then Mario Queiroz introduced most of us to mesh wireless networking and the first Google Wifi products, and then Chromecast Ultra and the first Google Home smart speaker. These products are all a bit outside this conversation, but also important historically as you could see Google building out its smart home platform in support of its other hardware, software, and services.

? My Google Pixel XL review

Unfortunately, my time testing the original Pixel XL uncovered several problems that I felt made it a less-than-stellar upgrade to the Nexus 6P and less competitive than I had hoped with the iPhone 7 Plus. Key points in my review, which I gathered manually (not with AI) include:

• A design that was too derivative of the iPhone
• A superior OLED display
• Weird popping sounds and other audio issues
• An excellent camera, though it seemed like a step down from the Nexus 6P
• Fast charging, but no wireless charging
• Google Assistant replaced Google Now
• Incredibly expensive compared to the Nexus 5X and 6P

? But wait, there’s more

Three weeks later, I published a follow-up with further perspectives on the pricing, which a friend pointed out was a multi-year investment that most would pay for over time. That was a fair point, and I came to understand that while the Pixel XL was disappointing in some ways compared with a niche phone I loved but few had ever seen, it was probably the best new Android phone at that time.

More relevant, perhaps, Pixel launched to mostly solid reviews, with the camera in particular getting high marks, but sales never amounted to much, and that would become a steady refrain over the past decade.

Then, I took another look at the OG Pixel XL six months later and found that my initial reactions to its price, design, and performance were still correct. But I had really warmed to the camera, which was the best choice for low-light shots and delivered terrific HDR colors. I also liked its clean Android image and Google (Project) Fi, which at that time was perhaps most notable for network-switching capabilities that required the dual radios in the OG Pixels.

It’s clear that I wanted Pixel to succeed, and that part of my lingering doubts were tied to how good the Nexus 6P had been. So it’s not surprising that I had many thoughts about what Google should do to improve the next generation of Pixel phones. And then we discovered in September 2017 that Google would announce the new lineup early the next month.

Surely things would go better with Pixel 2.