possible reason for bottom firing speaker instead of front facing speakers?

[beeztrain]

Does anyone think that maybe the choice to do a bottom firing speaker may have had something to do with daydream vr and the way the phone sits in the device? Just a thought...

 

[D13H4RD2L1V3]

I don't think that would be the reason for that.

Especially since Google could've just designed it in a way so that either the earpiece speaker also doubles as a loudspeaker so that it either outputs higher-frequency sound while the bottom one outputs lower-frequency sound (like the HTC 10), acts as a separate loudspeaker for stereo audio (like the iPhone 7) or both depending on the device's orientation (like the Huawei Mate 9).

We might see either dual front-facing speakers or any one of the setups above in the 2017 Pixel, but the current setup seems to be more of an afterthought.

It's also worth noting that people who wear VR headsets like the HTC Vive, Google Daydream View and the Samsung Gear VR would also likely be wearing headphones.

 

[N4Newbie]

View any smartphone tear-down video and you can see that the insides of your phone are incredibly tightly packed; design decisions must be made, some of which we will agree with and others we will not.

I agree that I would like to have the same dual front facing speakers that my Nexus 6P had, but in all honestly, I rarely use the speaker(s) anyway...

 

[Jeremy8000]

View any smartphone tear-down video and you can see that the insides of your phone are incredibly tightly packed; design decisions must be made, some of which we will agree with and others we will not.

Had the speakers been front-firing, they would have directed sound to the inside of the Daydream headset, but with the way that they are designed there is ample space for sound to channel out, conveniently located by the ears - it would have worked fine.

As the top/bottom bezels on the Pixel XL are actually larger, overall, than they were on the Nexus 6 (and I'm not a bezel-hater... I like being able to hold my phone without concern of accidentally pressing something). Looking at a teardown, they is actually ample room to have fitted a front-firing speaker within the bottom bezel. The section at the top is pretty jam-packed - the only justification I can see for not running dual front-firing speakers would be if, in the limited space they had, they were unable to effectively seat a speaker that could function at higher output where they seated the existing 'earpiece' speaker.

 

[gone down south]

I like that I can set my phone down either face up or face down and not have the sound end up muffled.