We’ve already seen quite a bit leaked ahead of the rumoured October 4 phone announcement from Google, but the biggest news probably remains the change from the Nexus branding to Google’s own Pixel branding. Of course, this is just a (very well founded) rumour, but it seems there’s now even more evidence of the name change.
Well known leaker LlabTooFer (yes, the Twitter name is ridiculous) has given us further confirmation of the change in brand, showing off the new ‘Pixel Launcher’ in a series of tweets:
Google's new Pixel Launcher. pic.twitter.com/g974gVOKzT
— LlabTooFeR (@LlabTooFeR) September 12, 2016
From what we understand, and from what we can see too, there’s no major changes in the launcher with the change to Pixel branding, just a new name and a new version number, which also helps confirm something else. It’s been widely speculated that the Pixel devices will ship with the first maintenance release of Android Nougat, version 7.1, and the version code for Pixel Launcher — 7.1.32xx — seems to confirm that, as the launcher version usually matches the Android version.
We’re expecting a launch event on October 4, which is just a few weeks away. We’ll hopefully be there to cover the event and bring you the news first hand.
Hits Twitter handle is not all that unusual. His original handle was Football. But he dropped off the scene for a while. When he came back, he wanted a similar handle and went for LlabTooFer which is reFooTbalL backwards. Learnt all this on XDA a little while ago because he makes the best HTC One ROM’s around (MaximusHD).