Throughout this week, we had Google’s annual developer conference happening at Moscone West, in San Francisco. As usual, the company unveiled a series of new products and gave away plenty of hardware to its attendees. Plus, we had a circus show moment during the opening keynote, which was probably the coolest product demo ever.
The keynote could have been name Android Revamped, or something like that. Google introduced the new version of its mobile operating system, called Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean”. As a fellow twitter friend said, if this trend continues, “5.0 will be called ‘Diabetes’”. Jokes aside, there are plenty of new features available:
- Improved notifications: for instance, you may share content from the notifications, without having to go to the app; or make call directly from a missed call notification. Android continues to be the best in this regard, and iOS and Windows Phone still have some catching up to do here.
- Smarter widget management on the home screen: widgets will move away from a new widget being added or moved, and they will re-size themselves if there is no space available for them to fit.
- Improved touch responsiveness: result of something called Project Butter. It does a lot of technical stuff under the hood, which consumers don’t give a crap about, but they help with smoother and more consistent animations.
- Google Now: this is probably the most important feature, as it turns the device into a decent personal assistant. It uses data available from your Google account to provide contextual useful information and directions. Paired with Google’s excellent voice recognition system, this is a serious competitor against Siri.
Features aside, I didn’t like the presentation. It was very amateurish for something broadcasted live to the world — I can’t remember the last time I saw someone calling for the next slide during a keynote speech. This is something Google really needs to address, because details matter in a product release. It’s not as bad as the Surface crashing on the hands of Sinofsky, but it also won’t cost them an arm to properly rehearse these presentations.
They also announced their new tablet, the Nexus 7. As the name implies, it’s a 7”, powerful tablet. And it already ships with Jelly Bean. I haven’t tried it yet, but from what I can see on the videos, it doesn’t look cheaply built, and the responsiveness is quite good.
Google’s tablet move was clearly aimed to Amazon and its Kindle Fire, not the iPad. The presentation gravitated around content consumption: magazines, books, TV shows, movies, which was a weak area for Android tablets. Although this is a move in the right direction, Google still has to convince developers to create proper tablet apps for Android, which is their other big problem. The 7” screen format mitigates a bit the awfulness of scaling up phone apps on the tablet in some cases, but in most of them, the iPad experience is far superior.
Nexus 7 was probably the most expected announcement at Google I/O, and it didn’t seem to disappoint. The price point is about right — it costs the same as the Kindle Fire, but delivers much more for your money — and by having a 7” display, it shifted the attention from the obvious comparison with the iPad (which they would have lost) to another segment of the market in which Apple has no presence. The only criticism I have against it is that the Nexus 7 is just one more tablet in the market. Sure, it will be regularly updated by being a Nexus device, the price is good and the content offer increased, but it doesn’t do anything at all to make tablets better. If Google wants to become a serious player in the tablet game, it needs to do that.
Next, comes the Nexus Q. This one I really don’t get… the best description I can give to it is: Nexus Q is a very expensive psychedelic bocce ball which requires an Android device to do anything useful.
The comparison people will obviously do here is against Apple TV. Which is bad, because the Nexus Q is a flop next to it. First, it doesn’t support anything besides Google Play and YouTube; Apple TV, on the other hand, has the iTunes ecosystem, YouTube, Netflix, MLB, NBA, NHL, Vimeo, WSJ Live and Flickr.
Second, there is streaming: you must stream from an Android device, and only content from the Google Play app or YouTube. With Apple TV, stream is available from the cloud (iTunes Store and iTunes Match), from any computer in the same network (Windows PC or Mac), and via AirPlay from any iOS device, including AirPlay mirroring from the iPad, which means you can actually play games on your TV.
The only field where the Nexus Q beats Apple TV is in the number of options for connectivity, which isn’t that relevant to be fair. Aside from having the usual connection options (HDMI and optical SPDIF), Apple TV has an alternative for those who need only audio (AirPort Express), and Apple’s done a good job convincing top manufacturers to enable AirPlay in their speaker systems and receivers, so in some scenarios you actually don’t need an Apple device at all.
Then there is the price: at $300, it’s 3x more expensive than Apple TV. Hell, for that price, you could get an Apple TV for your living room, plus an AirPort Express to stream audio somewhere else, plus another Apple TV for your bedroom. It really doesn’t make sense.
To close the keynote, there was the Project Glass demo. Despite the simply awful presentation afterwards, the demo itself was probably the greatest product demo ever. I can’t really describe it, so you’ll have to see the video yourselves.
Project Glass is still something that looks foolish and geeky today, but it’s a mistake to dismiss such technology. I believe in a few years, they could overcome the problems and come up with a very good, useful product. So, stay tuned in this project… we may have a few surprises in the long run.
To wrap up, this was the best Google I/O so far, since I first started following it a couple years ago. Aside from the nonsense Nexus Q, the rest of the product releases were good and the Project Glass demo was a nice touch.
I encourage you to read on the web about the other stuff presented at the conference, such as Google’s cloud initiatives, which are very interesting from both technical and market standpoint.
* The Google I/O 2012 logo is a Google Inc. property.