Google’s newest flagship phones, the Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, may have been informally shown to the globe during the holiday weekend. On eBay, a prototype of one of the phones with a modified back cover and camera housing was listed.
The item has been taken down, but as Esper’s Mishaal Rahman pointed out in a tweet, it lingers on in the Wayback Machine internet archive, where we can see a lot of purported facts. The Pixel 7 appears to retain the majority of the Pixel 6’s specifications, including a 6.4-inch screen, 128GB of storage, and 8GB of RAM, as well as dual SIM support (standard SIM and eSIM). The description doesn’t say if the Google Tensor chip will be the same as the one found in the Pixel 6 or whether it will be the second version, as speculations predict.
Several photographs connected to the offering show what seems to be a Pixel 7 prototype. It looks similar to the Google Pixel 6 from last year, with the same large rear camera block that splits the glass back cover in half.
The phone in the eBay offering, however, nestles its cameras in what seems to be a metal frame, unlike the Pixel 6’s camera block made of flawless glass, which looked a lot like Star Trek character Geordi LaForge’s visor. The same may be said about the Pixel 7 Pro, which is also visible in the eBay listing’s photographs, albeit only in reflection: as Rahman pointed out in a subsequent tweet, a snap of the rear of the supposed Pixel 7 clearly reflects another phone with one additional camera than the normal model.
The prototype sports a cutout on the top edge of the phone, in addition to the redesigned back camera block. Commenters on a Reddit post where the item initially surfaced speculate that it’s for an antenna, and maybe for ultra-wideband — a close communication protocol used, for example, by Android 12 to handle digital vehicle keys. The phone’s model identifier, GVU6C, is seen in the listing’s final photo.
Even if the prototype is genuine, it is possible that the final design of the Pixel 7 or 7 Pro will differ. Other prototypes with alternative designs might exist, and Google has plenty of time to fine-tune the phones’ appearance before the October release date.
