The detail was confirmed in an interview with Gearbeast, in which it seems like the exec, Charlene Munilall, was very deliberate in saying that Huawei was working on a Nexus phone. It’s unknown at this point if Munilall thought the news was already out, or if she knew this was the first time we were hearing about it.
“The operators generally don’t take up the Nexus device,” said Munilall in the interview when asked why the Nexus 6P wasn’t launched in South Africa. “That said, the distributors, our open market, do bring in the device, that’s how Cellucity got it … and that will still be the same this year. We’re doing the Nexus again this year, by the way.”
It’s certainly a surprise — Google hasn’t made any announcement regarding this year’s Nexus phones, even though Sundar Pichai did confirm that the company would continue to release Nexus handsets. In the interview Pichai said that Google would invest more effort in overseeing the development of Nexus phones and that it will have more of a hand in Nexus designs. While it was previously thought that HTC would develop two Nexus handsets, this news either means that HTC will only develop one, or that there will be three Nexus phones in total.
Pichai also talked about the fact that Google may, in the future, “thoughtfully add more features on top of Android or Nexus phones.” It was not explained what kinds of features will be added or why those features won’t be included in stock Android.
Huawei responded to request for comments by saying that it doesn’t “speculate on rumors” and “has nothing to share at this point.”
