Google Pixel 7 and 7 Pro Prototypes Show Possible Camera Redesign
Prototypes for Google's next flagship phones may have been revealed in an eBay listing.
A listing for a prototype of the Google Pixel 7 went up on eBay in May 2022.
Over the holiday weekend, Google's next flagship phones, the Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, may have been finally revealed to the world ... unofficially. A listing for a prototype of one of the phones went up on eBay, showing a redesigned back cover and camera housing.
The listing has been pulled down, but as pointed out in a tweet by Esper's Mishaal Rahman, it lives forever on the Wayback Machine internet archive -- and we get a lot of supposed details. Most of the Pixel 7's specs seem unchanged from the Pixel 6: a 6.4-inch screen, 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, with dual SIM (standard SIM and eSIM). The listing doesn't specify whether the Google Tensor chip is the same as in the Pixel 6 or whether it'll be the second generation of the silicon, as rumors suggest.
You can see the supposed Pixel 7 prototype in several photos attached to the listing. It doesn't look too different from last year's Google Pixel 6, retaining the wide rear camera block that splits the glass back cover in two.
But unlike the Pixel 6's camera block made of seamless glass, which looked a lot like Star Trek character Geordi LaForge's visor, the phone in the eBay listing nestles its cameras in what looks like a metal frame. The same could be true of the Pixel 7 Pro, which is also seen in the eBay listing's photos, albeit only in reflection: as Rahman pointed out in a later tweet, a photo of the back of the purported Pixel 7 reflects another phone that clearly has one more camera than the standard version.
Read more: Pixel 7 Rumors: A Few Possible Specs and Speculation
Aside from the new rear camera block, the prototype has a cutout on the top edge of the phone. Commenters on a Reddit post, where the listing was first reported, theorize it's for an antenna, and possibly for ultra-wideband -- the nearby communication protocol used, for example, by Android 12 to support digital car keys. The listing's final photo shows the phone's model designation, GVU6C.
If the prototype is real, it still may not reflect the final design of the Pixel 7 or 7 Pro. Other prototypes with different designs could exist, and there's still plenty of time for Google to tweak the look of the phones before we expect them to be released in October.
Google didn't respond to a request for comment.