Google bucks soaring phone prices with Pixel

Google bucked the soaring smartphone price trend Tuesday, unveiling a high-performance Pixel handset aimed at the middle of the market as part of a wide-ranging pitch to developers of its new hardware, software and privacy efforts.

The Pixel 3a phone, which includes many of the artificial intelligence features of its flagship devices, is priced from $399, executives said as Google opened its annual I/O developers conference near its headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View. “There has been a troubling trend of high-end phones getting more expensive,” Google head of hardware Rick Osterloh said. “So, we challenged ourselves to deliver a high-end experience in a new Pixel 3a starting at $399.”

Budget appeal

The new Pixel 3a device is being introduced as Apple and Samsung have boosted prices of their newest handsets to over $1,000, and with Google’s flagship Pixel 3 selling from around $800. Pixel 3a has features “extremely attractive to users on a budget,” and comes as a threat to the leading Android-powered smartphone maker Samsung, according to Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi.

Google also introduced a Nest Hub Max device that combines a 10-inch (25-centimeter) display with a camera, microphone, sound system and a digital assistant. Smarts built into Max include facial recognition that allows the device to personalize experiences and even alert owners when someone it doesn’t recognize is in a home, according to executives. Max will be priced at $229 when it launches later this year in Australia, Britain and the US.

Privacy minded

Along with weaving podcasts and 3-D augmented reality images into search results, Google is enabling more of the computing to be done on handsets where users have control. “Instead of sending data to the cloud, we shipped machine learning models directly to your device,” Pichai said.