It was just last week that I had written about Samsung having “a foot in the mouth” kind of a situation every time they want to launch a phone. This time around it’s Google that has “accidentally” given a strong hint of a new phone making its way to the marketplace.
Reported by the XDA-Developers, Google published a new commit on its Android Open Source Project pages.
Cherrypick “Add device config to decide which Auto Selection Network UI to use.” This change added the config because the HAL V_1_2 only supports Pixel 3, and the new Auto Selection Network UI is based on HAL V_1_2. So we set the flag to decide which Auto Selection Network UI should be used based in the device type.
For general public (me included), we could not have made sense of any of this, if it weren’t for the actual developers to point this out (meaning get excited).
I reckon there is still time for the actual phone to see the light of day, but this seems to be a start. There has been established a proper channel consisting of rumours, and systemic leaks before a phone company actually “admits” and “confirms” and finally then, launches a device. And the romour mills have started churning out rumours already. There is talk via separate leak recently, that discovered a third Pixel handset in development, codenamed ‘Desire’, which is being projected as a much cheaper device, to target emerging markets. That phone may not be the Pixel 3.
Elsewhere, Droid-Life speculated the code references Google makes are likely to correspond to Project Treble, the new core built into Android Oreo which enables Android phones. And in yet another part of tech town, 9to5Mac deciphered the word ‘Cherrypick’ of the commit, and suggested that Google probably didn’t intend for this to be viewed publicly.
If any of this is to be believed, (of course all of it will be true in some form or the other because Google …Duh!), we are looking at probably the second and (wishfully the best) flagship phone of 2018 under development and that is reason enough to get a tingling sensation.
Post Script: What if this mixture of words were intentionally “accidentally” posted on the AOSP? What if the device is under tests already? Its going to be a great year.
[“Source-cartoq”]