Pixel 6

On October 19th, Google announced that its latest smartphone, Pixel 6, would be available in the end of the month. We can see the product in Google Store. In the US, the price of Pixel 6 is 100 USD cheaper than the previous model. However, the latest product has new features. It means that Google tries to gain the market share.

Google has its long history to produce its own hardware with trial and error. For example, it acquired Motorola Mobility, which was an American consumer electronics and telecommunications company, for US$12.5 billion in 2012. However, the US tech giant sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion in 2014.

Therefore, even the US giant is struggling to sell its own hardware. Google has its strong expertise in software. For instance, the company has several billion user services including Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail. However, if the company where we are working has the billion user service, it seems difficult to acquire more users.

In addition, Google is a public company, so shareholders give pressure to it to increase the share price. Therefore, the US company should find other revenue sources, and hardware or a smartphone is one of them. What’s more, its competitors such as Apple and Tesla earn money from both hardware and software. In order to compete with these rivals, it wants to acquire more market share in the smartphone market.

New Features

Even though the new model becomes cheaper, Google has added some new features into it. For example, the company has competitive advantage in digital image processing thanks to its expertise. As a result, users can erase unnecessary objects from their pictures while using Pixel 6. What’s more, consumers can blur background of their pictures so that they will be more natural.

In addition to this, Google has developed its own chip called “Tensor” and the company uses it in new phones. Own chip allows new Pixel series to reduce energy consumptions. In other words, users can enjoy longer battery life. As we see the other article, battery life is one of the reasons why users will buy a new smartphone.

Google has also strong expertise in natural language processing. Thus, users will be able to enjoy real time translation among different languages. In the presentation, Google demonstrated it by interviewing “Konmari” in Japanese.

More than advertisement

In the other article about Softbank’s Vision Fund, Son referred to the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In fact, he told that the Internet has affected very limited industries including retailing and advertisement.

Google or its parent company, Alphabet, still relies on advertisement in terms of its revenue and profit. Of course, Alphabet has other subsidiaries such as Waymo to improve our society through their new technologies. Google also wants to do the same thing by selling its hardware, latest Pixel Series.

In addition, this new challenge gives more opportunity to it. For example, the US tech giant will improve its own chip and produce more. As a result, it is also possible that the company sell its own chips to other companies. Therefore, we can say that Google tries to be more than an advertisement company.