If you’ve ever dreamed of owning the latest version of a Google-made Pixel phone that would compromise not only on design but also on speed and performance, well, you should know that Google will soon grant you that wish. That’s going to be the Pixel 3 Lite series that’s launching this year, and it will apparently include both a regular and an XL version. Neither phone can measure up to the Pixel 3 flagships that Google released in October, and we now have a new benchmark leak to prove it.
The Google “Bonito” handset in the following screenshot, identified as a “Google Pixel 3a XL,” scores just 1640 and 4973 in benchmark tests. If you were hoping that Google would somehow keep in place that Snapdragon 845 processor and make other compromises to lower the price of the Pixel 3 Lite, that’s not going to be the case.
The phone does sport a Snapdragon processor, likely the 710, as Dutch-language blog MobielKopen claims. The benchmark also reveals the phone only sports 4GB of RAM. As always with tests, this one could also be spoofed. That doesn’t mean the Pixel 3 Lite phones aren’t real though. After all, a few days ago we saw a video review of a prototype unit, so Google is making these things and we may soon see them in stores.
The move may seem surprising, considering that Google killed the Nexus phones in favor of the Pixels a few years ago. Most Nexus phones were cheaper than their iPhone or Galaxy S counterparts, but Google wanted to target the premium sector of the market with the Pixel line.
Fast forward to 2019 and Google has yet to really to leave its mark on the premium smartphone market. Selling expensive phones has become harder even for Samsung and Apple. Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and Note 9 weren’t exciting enough to drive upgrades. Apple sold millions of iPhone XS and iPhone XR phones, but it still failed to meet its goals for the fourth quarter of 2018, posting a rare guidance correction a few weeks ago.
So the Pixel Lite phones, whenever they’ll be ready to hit stores, have a different mission for Google, and that’s to help it gain some market share at the expense of competitors. That might be a tough thing to do as long as phones like OnePlus 6T and Pocophone F1 exist, however.
