Why The Pixel 10 Will Be Google's Latest Game Changer
Pixel 9 lifestyle image
The mid-range smartphone market is one of the most competitive of any year. Samsung, with the Galaxy A56 and Honor, with the titular Honor 400, are working hard to stand out and claim the space as their own. Google will be stepping into that market with the Pixel 10. How does it hope to stand out and shape the space to its benefit?
There will be one evident change to the Pixel 10 over last year's equivalent. Where the Pixel 9 came with two lenses on the main camera, the Pixel 10 is expected to introduce a third lens. This will be a telephoto lens, the first in one of the modern vanilla Pixel models.
There will be a cost to that. The wide and ultrawide camera lenses will not follow 50 megapixel wide and 48 megapixel ultrawide in the Pixel 9, but instead the Pixel 9a's 48 megapixel wide and 13 megapixel ultrawide.
No doubt Google will lean into the advantages that AI will offer when processing the imaging data to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile, consumers will see the telephoto option as something new that exceeds the lens count of some of the competition. For those that match the count, it reduces one more negative point from the sales package.
Unlike flagship smartphones, which tend to stick with the latest generation of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Series, the mid-range has a wide range of chipsets to choose from. You have the fallback of the Snapdragon 7 series used by Honor, Samsung's own Exynos chipset in the A56, and Mediatek's Dimensity in Xiaomi's 14T.
Since the Pixel 6, Google has shipped Pixels with its own design of chips. The fifth generation Tensor mobile chip will ship with the Pixel 10 family, and it's widely expected that all Pixel 10 models will ship with an identical Tensor G5.
The most significant advantage of Tensor is Google developing it alongside Gemini and various AI software. Tensor has many of the subroutines required 'baked in' to the silicon, making for both a faster experience and one where more options can be leveraged. This year the Tensor Mobile will be manufactured by TSMC using its 3nm N3E process. This should offer gains both in battery life and raw performance.
Tensor is not designed for ultimate performance. Instead, it is geared towards the best day-to-day experience for consumers.
Android 16 is going through the final steps of its public beta test. The gold version will be heading to manufacturers over the summer, ready to be bundled up into the latest smartphones first, before becoming available over the air as a software upgrade.
It won't come as a surprise that the Pixel family will be some of the first smartphones to ship with Android 16 out of the box. That will give the Pixel 10 a short-term advantage over the competition.
Android 16 will also bundle the latest AI tools showcased at Google's I/O developer conference, which took place this month. Again, that gives the Pixel 10 a few months with the new AI tools until the rest of the mid-range smartphones are offered their own Android upgrades.
There's one other advantage Google is handing the Pixel 10... it will offer seven years of software support through new versions of Android, as well as the requisite security fixes. That's one year more than the current leading smartphones at this price point.
While the headlines will no doubt focus on the extra features in the Pixel 10 Pro and the larger display of the Pixel 10 Pro XL, the Pixel 10 may have the heaviest impact on the market. The camera's hardware and software will be pushed to the limit, the latest version of Android will steer the conversation around mobile AI towards Google's vision, and the issue of the longevity of mid-range handsets will remain a point of discussion.
Behind the headlines, the Pixel 10 is ready to deliver.
Now read the latest Google Pixel 10, Samsung Galaxy and Qualcomm Snapdragon headlines in Forbes' weekly smartphone news digest...
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