
Google hasn’t been shy about their upcoming Pixel-branded hardware. At Google I/O 2022 – the company’s yearly developer conference – the wraps were taken off of a slew of new devices, including the Pixel 6a, Pixel Buds Pro, Pixel Watch, Pixel Tablet and the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. For a company still relatively new to the hardware game, most would consider those additions to the portfolio quite enough for the near future. But Google may have one more surprise in the bag.
Thanks to a fair bit of digging by 9to5 Google, it looks like there could be another, mysterious Pixel phone on the way to join the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. 9to5’s earlier report that the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro would feature displays that were quite similar to the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro also lead to another discovery: a completely separate Pixel phone.
As they found evidence of code in the Android Open Source Project of the code names for the Pixel 7 (‘Panther’) and the Pixel 7 Pro (‘Cheetah’), they also found shorthand references to these devices in the Android Git Repositories that tied each device to these new displays: ‘C10’ for ‘Cheetah’ and ‘P10’ for ‘Panther’. This all lines up and makes sense along with the addition of two other device code names 9to5 knows are linked to Pixel devices – ‘Felix’ and ‘Lynx’ – which should be for the Pixel 7a and perhaps the still-delayed Pixel Notepad foldable.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though. In the same place they found references to ‘C10’ and ‘P10’, there were also references to a display being worked on for another device tagged with references to ‘G10’. Digging deeper, it was discovered that this device’s physical size, refresh rate, and display resolution match that of the Pixel 7 Pro exactly, but the display is made by BOE instead of Samsung (like the screens for the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro).
So, what could this ‘G10’ device be? Right now, we don’t know. I find it a bit odd that Google would have another device being built with a screen from a different manufacturer that has the same size and resolution of the one we know is coming for the Pixel 7 Pro. With this screen size known, we can at least squash the idea that this is the screen for the Pixel Notepad, Pixel Tablet, or even some unknown Pixel Chromebook. It looks like it is some sort of alternate, but the question of why Google would do this remains. We have a bit of time before October, so perhaps it will come to light before then, but this is definitely a curious wrinkle.