What Pixel 3a tells us about the state of the smartphone — and Google

Published May 8, 2019

Announced yesterday at Google’s opening I/O keynote, the Pixel 3a arrives at a tenuous time for the smartphone industry. Sales figures have stagnated for most of the major players in the industry — a phenomenon from which Google certainly isn’t immune.

CEO Sundar Pichai discussed exactly that on the company’s Q1 earnings call last week. “While the first quarter results reflect pressure in the premium smartphone industry,” he explained, “we are pleased with the ongoing momentum of Assistant-enabled Home devices, particularly the Home Hub and Mini devices, and look forward to our May 7 announcement at I/O from our hardware team.”

That last bit was a clear reference to the arrival of the new budget tier of Google’s flagship offering. The 3a is a clear push to address one of the biggest drivers of slowing smartphone sales. With a starting price of $399, it’s a fraction of the price of top handsets from competitors like Apple and Samsung.

There’s been a fairly rapid creep in flagship prices in recent years. Handsets starting at north of $1,000 hardly warrant a second glance anymore, while many forthcoming foldables are hovering around double that.

As Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz told me ahead of launch, “The smartphone market has started to flatten. We think one of the reasons is because, you know, the premium segment of the market is a very large segment, but premium phones have gotten more and more expensive, you know, three, four years ago, you could buy a premium phone for $500.”

Inflated prices have certainly made device purchases more burdensome for buyers. That, coupled with a relative lack of compelling new features has gone a ways toward slowing down upgrade cycles, hurting sales in the process.

I’ve enjoyed my early hands-on time with the 3a — more to come on that later. It’s important to note the different factors that have allowed Google to get to this stage. A key driver is, of course, Google’s purchase of massive R&D resources from HTC. That result of HTC’s dip into sub-replacement level hardware manufacturer has resulted in the ability to develop hardware in house, on the relatively cheap at a new campus in Taipei.

Also important is Google’s ongoing quest to further uncouple the importance of hardware from smartphone upgrades. The company’s big investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence particularly are driving many of the innovations best demonstrated on the imaging side of things. Devin captured this sentiment in this piece written in the wake of the iPhone XS announcement.

Notably, the Pixel 3a has essentially the same camera hardware as the pricier 3. Google cut some corners here, but that wasn’t one. There are still and will continue to be some limitations to what the 3a is able to do, based on processing power, but the line between what the two devices can do is already pretty blurry when it comes to taking photos.

There’s another factor that’s been looming over Pixel sales in all of this — but for several reasons, Pichai wasn’t ready to discuss it on the call. For years, the line has been hampered by carrier exclusivity, something that feels like it ought to be relegated to the smartphone past.

Certainly that sort of arrangement makes sense for young companies like OnePlus or Palm, which are looking for a way into a market, while seeking to maintain manageable growth. But Google certainly has the resources to grow outside of a single carrier deal. And the fact of the matter (as Huawei has discovered the hard way) is that carrier distribution and contracts as still key drivers of smartphone distribution here in the States, even as most manufacturers also offer unlocked devices. I suspect those upfront costs are enough to make many consumers do a double take — even though we all know in our hearts the contract is ultimately where they get you.

Thankfully, Google announced that it will be making the Pixel 3 and 3a available on a lot more carriers, starting this week. That move ought to have a marked impact on the Pixel’s sales figures going forward. The addition of Sprint and T-Mobile among others means a lot more retail shelf space and ad dollars across the U.S. Devices are a harder sell when your average consumer has to go out of their way to find them — not to mention the difficulty of convincing users to switch carriers for a new device.

I’d caution against using Q2 results as a direct measure of the 3a’s appeal and Google’s move toward a six-month device release cycle. At this early stage it’s too early to uncouple that from new customers who are coming on board courtesy of those carrier additions. Even so, the device is an interesting litmus test for the current state of the smartphone, right down to the return of the headphone jack.

The headphone jack is back for the Google Pixel 3a

Published May 7, 2019

Hello old friend. I knew you would be back. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew we would be reunited again. It turns out all it would take was a cratering smartphone market to bring you back around.

Google, of course, famously stood its ground on the importance of the 3.5 mm for the first Pixel, only to drop it a generation later. Now that the company’s got a budget offering in the form of the Pixel 3a, it’s returned to the nurturing arms of the hardwired headphone.

The move makes financial sense. Hardware manufacturers have been a bit more hesitant to drop the technology of budget and mid-tier devices, due to the added cost of asking users to upgrade to either Bluetooth headphones or USB-C models.

Curiously, however, the 3a won’t actually ship with its own headphones. According to Google, “Since Pixel 3a has compatibility with 3.5mm analog audio, USB-C digital audio and wireless Bluetooth 5.0, we feel like this gives users the flexibility to choose the headphones that are best suited to their individual needs.”

I mean, sure. But let’s be real, this likely had a lot more to do with manufacturing margins on the devices. Given how cheap these sorts of default headphones likely are to produce, however, it would have been a nice gesture to toss them in for users.

Google’s budget Pixel 3a starts at $399, available in ‘purple-ish’

Google’s budget Pixel 3a starts at $399, available in ‘purple-ish’

Published May 7, 2019

Last week’s earnings didn’t go the way Alphabet wanted. The fault primarily lies at the feet of the company’s ad business, but the hardware side didn’t come out great, either. Like the rest of the industry, Google’s been struggling to sell smartphones. Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” in reference to Pixel 3 sales figures.

He did, however, hint at good things to come. Selling the future is an important part of a CEO’s job, of course, but there are reasons to be hopeful. There are interesting innovations on the way, like 5G and foldables, and, in Google’s case, there are other things in the works. Pichai alluded to both a new Taipei R&D campus and, in the much shorter term, hardware announcements planned for Google I/O.

It was clear to all listening that the exec was referring to the Pixel 3a with the latter bit. Like the Pixel 3 before it, the phone had leaked out all over the place in the preceding months and weeks. By late last week, it was showing up at Best Buys in Ohio.

Like the aforementioned Taipei campus, the device is very much the product of Google’s massive investment in HTC’s R&D team. Tired of outsourcing design, the company simply went ahead and picked up an existing property. The deal made sense from Google’s perspective — HTC knows how to make phones, even if it’s forgotten how to actually sell them.

Another thing the Taipei team brought to the table was the ability to build a phone on a budget. It’s something that could ultimately prove a saving grace for the Pixel team as Google and the industry at large grapple with those “headwinds” of stagnant global economies and slowed upgrade cycles. What makes the 3a a particularly compelling product, however, is how it fits in with Google’s long-stated plan of innovating more on the software/AI/ML fronts.

From the sound of the company’s past rhetoric, hardware is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the topic of smartphone advances, and this $399 handset is a good place to prove that out.

“The smartphone market has started to flatten,” Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz told TechCrunch ahead of launch. “We think one of the reasons is because, you know, the premium segment of the market is a very large segment, but premium phones have gotten more and more expensive, you know, three, four years ago, you could buy a premium phone for $500.”

The Pixel 3a cuts some hardware corners, compared to its flagship brethren, but manages the feat of coming in at $399 for the standard version and $479 for the XL — those sport 5.6 and 6.0 OLEDs, respectively. The design looks remarkably similar to the Pixel 3, though the glass and metal materials have been swapped out for a cheaper polycarbonate unibody design.

The biggest change internally is the switch from last year’s cutting edge Snapdragon 845 to a much more middling 640. That won’t make a huge difference for most daily tasks, but you may well notice an impact on more resource-intensive tasks like gaming.

I’ve been using the XL for a couple of days now (albeit laid up in bed with the stomach flu for a few of them), and have found it to be a pretty reliable mid-tier device, coupled with some of the standard Pixel features like Active Edge — not to mention the shocking return of the headphone jack. I’ll report back when I’ve been able to play with it a bit longer, to see whether Google’s promise of hardware agnosticism can really excel here.

Google does seem to have a lot of hope riding on this one, along with what looks to be a shift to a half-year phone release cycle (flagship in fall, budget in spring). The company is competing with a lot of budget smartphone makers, including one-time subsidiary Motorola and countless manufacturers in China. The appeal of a cheaper Pixel is apparent, but this isn’t a device that screams excitement, Purple-ish color aside.

That said, Google finally opening the device to additional U.S. carriers beyond Verizon should certainly help. The 3a will be available online starting today, with in-store availability starting tomorrow.