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Google Pixel Phone Ads Appear on Home Page; Telstra Ships Handsets a Week Early

Google Pixel Phone Ads Appear on Home Page; Telstra Ships Handsets a Week Early

By Tasneem Akolawala | Updated: 14 October 2016 13:22 IST

Highlights

Telstra has begun shipping the Pixel phones in Australia
Users are posting photos and videos of their delivered units
Google is also pushing ads on its homepage pushing people to pre-order

Google unveiled the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones at its Made by Google event and launched it first in the UK, Germany, Australia, the US, and India. In India, the pre-orders have begun on Flipkart and the devices are expected to be shipped starting October 25. In Australia, the smartphones were expected to be shipped next week, but carrier partner Telstra has already begun shipping the smartphones to pre-ordered customers. Furthermore, Google has also been aggressively pushing ads of the smartphone on its home page.

Telstra users are now posting pictures and videos of the phone confirming that they have already received their Google Pixel or Google Pixel XL smartphones. A much cited early shipping post was by Reddit user wooparse, who is now running tests on the smartphone and posting them online.

In the meanwhile, the tech giant is levering its extensively used search engine to push Pixel ads to reach more users. Many users see a pop-up when visiting the Google home page on mobile or destop asking them if they want to pre-order the Pixel phones. Clicking on 'Yes', redirects them Made by Google page, from where they can click the pre-order link, and then be taken to the Google Store page (or in the case of India, a list of retailers including Flipkart is shown) where the Pixel smartphones are listed.

This doesn't happen always, and shows up only for users in the countries where the smartphones have launched. However, it is quite widespread and the advertisement shows up on mobile as well as desktop. Talking about ads, Google has also released two new video ads for its Pixel smartphones and you can watch them below.

Google has seldom ever marketed a product this much, and these efforts speak volumes of the company's serious focus on hardware. In US, Google has partnered with Verizon exclusively. The company has claimed that all the security patches will be handled by Google directly, but the system updates will be taken care of by Verizon. However, the carrier maintains that it won't stand in the way of system updates, and will roll it out at the same time as Google.

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