A few days before Google unveiled the Pixel 2 at its October hardware event, it was announced that the company would be spending $1.1 billion to acquire around 2,000 HTC employees to beef up its hardware division. A little over four months since this deal was announced, Google's confirmed that it's been completed.
Google worked closely with HTC's hardware talent during the development of both the first-gen Pixel and Pixel 2, but now that they're officially working under the Google umbrella, the result should (hopefully) be even better hardware design and reliability than what we've seen from the past two years.
The employees that are joining Google are the same ones that helped HTC launch the first 3G-capable phone in 2005, the first smartphone that used a touchscreen as the primary input in 2007, and the first phone made entirely out of a metal unibody in 2013 (the HTC One M7).
The hardware improvements that Google made from the Pixel to Pixel 2 are awfully impressive, and while it's too early to truly speculate about what the Pixel 3 will offer, the completion of the HTC deal can only benefit the development of the phone.
Lastly, Google also says that the acquisition will allow it to expand operations further into Asia – specifically using Taiwan as a "key innovation and engineering hub" and Taipei now becoming Google's biggest engineering site in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Galaxy S9 will be great, but I'm waiting for Google's Pixel 3
