While indecisive Google is playing catch-up with Apple, Samsung plows ahead (Pixel Fold, Pixel Watch, Pixel 6)

The mobile tech business is a highly competitive one. It's not enough to just create good products, but to be among the first and the boldest in offering something that really grabs people's attention.

And trying to be unique and different is a huge financial risk, just ask Samsung. The Korean company has been a vicious Apple competitor for many years now; unstoppable.

However there's a third big name in our wonderful world of mobile tech, with a ton of money and power behind it, that you'd think would be just as big of an Apple challenger as Samsung is. But alas, Google is regularly so slow and indecisive to actually release competitive products in time, that it likely missed its chance to ever be an equal to the other two, in terms of worldwide presence.

Google keeps flip-flopping between releasing a foldable Pixel Fold and not

The Google Pixel Fold has now been on the burner for a couple of years. Since the first leaks we got that Google is working on a Galaxy Fold challenger, that it could still release before Apple, things kept changing.

The name of the Pixel foldable alone changed internally from the initially-presumed "Google Pixel Fold" to "Google Passport", to most recently – the "Pixel Notepad". What else changed a surprising amount of times is its presumed release date.

Google kept delaying and delaying this folding phone, reportedly because it wasn't sure it had much to offer in order to compete with the Galaxy Z Fold 3. And while that makes sense – as the Z Fold 3 is awesome, following several generational improvements – imagine if Samsung was like that. Not releasing the first Z Fold at all, because it had durability issues and foldables weren't even a thing back then. Nah, what Samsung did is go ahead and pull the trigger, then gradually began not only putting the foldable phone market on the map, but dominating it too.

Would Google have lost some money if it actually released the Pixel Fold last year? Probably. Would it have beaten the Galaxy Z Fold 3 in sales, or even availability? For sure not. But it's not like Samsung was cashing in a ton of checks from the first Z Fold. It took a bold risk and consistency for this idea to pay off, instead of staying indecisive and potentially letting somebody else steal the folding phone market.

Google took nearly four years to release its own smartwatch, the Pixel Watch

In January of 2019, Google paid $40 million to buy a smartwatch IP from Fossil. You won't need your detective glasses to see that what Google bought would eventually turn into the upcoming Google Pixel Watch. The Pixel Watch will reportedly be packing a four-year-old Samsung processor inside too – the Exynos 9110 from 2018.

Could Google have released the Pixel Watch back in 2019, if it was a more decisive and quick-to-action type of company? That processor would've been current as heck back then, not so much now.

But no, Google took its time. The Google Pixel Watch is slated to come out this fall, 2022, many, many years after Apple has conquered the smartwatch market, with Samsung dominating what's left.

Google waited too long to make its own unique smartphone (Pixel 6)

In recent years, Google started releasing Pixel-branded smartphones. The first Google Pixel came out in 2016, manufactured by HTC. It enjoyed rave reviews, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire with a unique design or identity. In fact, it looked suspiciously a bit too much like an iPhone 6 from the front, which had already been out for two years.

A couple of years later with the Pixel 3 XL Google really dropped the ball in my eyes, by giving it the most hideous, largest notch ever, just because Apple's iPhones had recently adopted a notch.



It was the equivalent of a no-name Chinese iPhone knock-off from a design perspective, and really spoke to how little Google tried designing its own identity, instead aiming to trick your grandma into thinking the Pixel was an iPhone.

It's not all bad, though. Last year it finally happened – with the Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, the search engine giant finally came up with its own, bold smartphone identity. Those phones were unmistakably Google Pixels, not an Apple clone, not a Samsung clone, nothing like that.