Earlier at the Mobile World Congress, Rick Osterlo (the head of Google hardware) had confirmed the imminent arrival of another flagship phone from the Pixel series. Despite the increasing hype and popularity surrounding this phone, there have been multiple complaints of microphones issues affecting both Pixel and Pixel XL lately as the company is now trying its best to salvage its reputation by offering replacements.
Recently, users took to Google products forum and Reddit to complain about the troubles that they are facing with their Pixel phones. A Reddit user called DiabeticCookieLover explained how a brand new Pixel phone turned out to be a faulty one:
"I got my Pixel last night, was pretty excited about setting it up. I went to test out assistant, held the home button... "What's the weather like tomorrow"... and it didn't detect anything I was saying. I thought that was weird, so I tried placing a call to my wife, she answered, but couldn't hear anything i was saying, although I could hear her fine. I tried some voice recording apps as well, but the microphone wasn't picking up anything, it was just recording a "pop" sound. I did a factory reset, as that's always the first step support makes you try anyway, and set it up as a new phone. With no google account sign in or extra apps installed, but still no mic."
This wasn't just an isolated incident, but several users took to the platform to complain with similar set of problems.
A Google executive, Brian Rakowski addressed the users and admitted that it was in fact an hardware issue, "The most common problem is a hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec. This will affect all three mics and may result in other issues with audio processing. This problem tends to be transient because of the nature of the crack. Based on temperature changes or the way you hold the phone, the connection may be temporarily restored and the problems may go away."
He furthermore said that these problems were faced by only 1% of Google Pixel owners, which seems quite unbelievable, given the popularity of the handset. Nevertheless, Google has offered replacement for the faulty models and hopefully this should sort out the mess.
