Pixel 8 Pro and (probably) Pixel Watch 2 briefly appear on the Google Store

Ben Schoon | Aug 30 2023 - 5:46 am PT

Believe it or not, we’re less than two months away from the launch of Google’s next Pixel products, and a brief leak on the Google Store this week shows off the Pixel 8 Pro as well as what is probably the Pixel Watch 2.

On the Google Store’s subscriptions page, it was spotted by @android_setting on Twitter (shared by Mishaal Rahman) that Google had started using a render of the Pixel 8 Pro. Alt text on the image directly confirmed that the image was showing “a person [taking] a call on a Pixel 8 Pro phone in Porcelain.”

The image has since been taken down, but we were also able to download the image from Google’s site before it was removed in the early morning hours today.

We don’t learn much new from this image, as the Pixel 8 Pro has already leaked several times. The image does, however, confirm our report from just last night that the Pixel 8 Pro will more closely match the Pixel Fold for its “Obsidian” and “Porcelain” color variants, with this warmer tone on full display in Google’s marketing image as seen closer up below.

Sources: Pixel 8 Pro borrows premium color tones from Pixel Fold

Much more interesting here is a potential, we’d argue probable, first look at the Pixel Watch 2. It’s hard to say for certain exactly what we’re looking at, but there are several points here that hint this is Google’s second smartwatch. The hardware appears slightly thinner (though this could simply be visual trickey from the angle of the shot), the digital crown looks a little different, and the side of the watch appears to look a little different too, almost as if there’s a border before the glass starts. Those points are all a little flaky, though, because it could boil down to the quality of the shot.

The strongest evidence that this is Pixel Watch 2 is actually the band, which has a champange-like color to it. As it stands today, the closest approximation to that is the “Chalk” active band that Google sells, but in actual photographs, that band tends to skew towards a more pure white tone.

Really, we can’t say anything all that definitive here, but there’s more than one reason to believe this could be our first look at Pixel Watch 2 – we haven’t seen any renders yet. Even if there weren’t much evidence to go on here, it just stands to reason that Google would use its new smartwatch alongside a picture of its new flagship phone.

As we’ve previously reported, Pixel Watch 2 will be coming with a new chipset that could lead to drastically better battery life. PIxel 8 Pro, meanwhile, is set to introduce Tensor G3 and a new temperature sensor, among other upgrades.

Dylan Roussel and Andrew Romero contributed to this article.