The heavy investment in HTC by Google last year was unexpected, but a definite boon for the struggling Taiwanese manufacturer. The investment has now officially closed with Google Senior Vice President, Hardware Rick Osterloh penning a blog post about what it means for Google.
The crux of the deal is that staff from HTC will now be working for Google and as the team is based in Taiwan, Google will now be setting up shop there as well. The Taiwan region will become Google’s largest engineering site in the Asia Pacific region, with engineers from HTC who worked on the Pixel and Pixel 2 phones now starting to work on the Pixel 3.
These same engineers, as Mr Osterloh points out, are the same ones who brought the first 3G smartphone to market in 2005, the first touch-centric phone in 2007, and the first all-metal unibody phone in 2013. What they will bring with the Pixel 3 is anyone’s guess.
The team has one mission: “to create radically helpful experiences for people around the world, by combining the best of Google’s AI, software and hardware”.
The past two Made by Google events have taken place on October 4th. It’s likely that development on the Pixel 3 was started a fair while back, but the countdown is now on for the third generation of Google hardware and we here at Ausdroid can’t wait.
Now please improve the build quality of any phones built by Google. Don’t let LG shit happens again.
Rubbish!
I’d like to see waterproofing, but retaining the HTC team makes that pretty unlikely I think.
Sorry. But isn’t the HTC U11 IP67 rated? That must mean that HTC engineers are able to design/build/manufacture phones with IP67 water & dust proofing.
Really want dual SIM one SIM for work and one for personal and one SIM for calls and the other for data especially when traveling
Hopefully once they are settled in to manufacturing they can get the build quality sorted ,
maybe get the price of handsets down too..
Now we just need them on more than one network in Australia!
What?
They’re only available on contract from Telstra. I think Warren wants them to be available on contract through all three of the big ones.
Thats up to the carriers at the end of the day and if they feel they can make a business case with how much they’re willing to subsidise the phones. Optus were literally days away from launching the Pixel 2’s and pulled out at the last moment due to conflict with the new iPhones. Guess they felt they had a stronger business case with the iphones.