How did Google turn the need for more space to build a better camera into a design classic?
Something I take note of is when people recognise a smartphone. The iPhone has managed to become ubiquitous and easily recognisable. That’s not something that most Android handsets can match; Samsung perhaps manages it by dint of being the “not Apple” manufacturer, so it becomes a safe guess.
I find it’s the Pixel that is noticed and recognised, albeit as “that’s the Google phone” rather than “Pixel”; but they are being identified and it is the camera bar doing all the work.
It’s probably one of the most important pieces of design made by Google in recent years, and now the company has talked about the decisions that led to the iconic feature.
The Camera Bar did not start from a fresh sheet of paper. For the Pixel 3, 4, and 5 family of smartphones, Google pushed the camera into a raised and rounded square block in the corner of the phone. It added character, but there were issues – notably the off-center location creating an unstable device when laid on a table and a lack of physical depth to pack in new optical hardware.
This had to change for the Pixel 6:
« If you look back at Pixel 5 all the sensors were all grouped into this little square — so when we knew the camera would be greatly improved, we wanted to do something different,” says industrial designer Sangsoo Park. “We didn’t want the phone to be bigger, and wanted to really maintain everything being contained and streamlined, but also celebrated in a way.”
The Pixel 6 and especially the Pixel 6 Pro allowed Google to step up its optical game – an important step up as the Pixel 6 was also the first device to ship with the Google-designed Tensor mobile chipset and the addition of AI and ML hardware to help process and edit photos. That extra space and volume allowed for everything to scale up, and the results were clear, as the team at DXOMark noted:
« With a DXOMARK Camera overall score of 135 the Google Pixel 6 Pro puts Google back into the group of manufacturers that is battling it out for the smartphone camera crown, making the device, at least from an imaging point of view, the best option for Android users in the US market by surpassing the competition from Samsung and Asus.
