The Google Phone - Public Services...

10/4/16, 12)19 PMThe Google Phone

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The Google Phone







By Dieter Bohn | Photography by James Bareham

In a nationally televised commercial that premiered last month, anempty search box sitting against a stark white background slowly morphs,becoming taller and skinnier. As Redbone croons “Come and get your love,”the lines take shape and the outline of a phone emerges. It is, of course, thePixel, a new phone “made by Google.” The metaphor damn near hits you inthe face: the search box once defined Google, but now Google needs to besomething more.

It needs to find what comes after that bare search box and the basic web pageresults it often returns. Google has been around for 18 years now andsomeday — perhaps soon — a better paradigm for using the internet is going

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNnCtmyujLA



to supplant the ubiquitous box. At the same time, Google has also decided itneeds to become a hardware company, making its own products instead ofleaving that work solely to partners.

"If you’re Google, would you trust the future of thecompany to your hardware partners? "

The two needs are directly related. If something is going to replace the searchbox, you can be sure Google wants to create it. And it may have, with theGoogle Assistant — the company’s take on an AI assistant that’s powered byGoogle’s massive cloud infrastructure and the huge amount of data it knowsabout you. But even the best software is pointless without compellinghardware to run it. And if you’re Google, would you trust the future of thecompany to your hardware partners? No, you’d want to control the entirething, end to end.

That’s why today Google is unveiling an entire, interconnected hardwareecosystem: two phones, an intelligent speaker, a VR headset, a Wi-Fi router,and a media-streaming dongle. And the most important parts of thatecosystem — the Pixel phone and Google Home speaker — exist to be theideal vessels for the Google Assistant. The rest of the products fill outGoogle’s ecosystem, but are also enhanced by Google’s cloud-basedintelligence.

In making its own hardware, Google is pitting itself against Apple for the firsttime, Google phone vs. iPhone. Those are very high stakes, with very littlemargin for error. So it looks like Google decided to follow a simple dictum:

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.



Google has made a lot of hardware in the past, but until now it’s allbeen tangential to Google’s core mission: search. From the disastrous NexusQ to the surprisingly successful Chromecast, Google’s products have all beenmade by different divisions without any real central strategy. That changed inApril of this year, when Google hired Motorola veteran Rick Osterloh as headof hardware.

Today, all hardware produced at Google runs through Osterloh’s division —which ensures consistent designs and purpose. Looking at Google’s newhardware, you’ll see more cohesion in its design than ever before. Finally, itfeels like all these products came from the same company. The aesthetic isn’tas rarefied as Apple or as aggressively futuristic as Samsung. Instead, it’sapproachable and comfortable — almost homey, like what you’d see in aRoom and Board catalog.

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Osterloh insists that he’d like Google to be more intentional in what itproduces moving forward. “It’s very challenging to work on dozens ofproducts and make them all terrific,” Osterloh says. “We have to have a lot ofdiscipline and a lot of focus.”

That means shuttering the Project Ara modular smartphone just threemonths after it was announced (Osterloh expects other companies to pick upthe modular torch) and leaving the moonshots to the X division at Alphabet.Google isn’t just experimenting with hardware anymore — it knows exactlywhat it wants to do.

“Fundamentally, we believe that a lot of the innovation that we want to donow ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience,” Osterloh

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says. It’s the kind of sentiment you usually hear from Apple, not Google. Thecompany needs to absolutely nail the Google Assistant experience, and doingthat meant not ceding an iota of control to partners in the first iteration. “Weneeded to build a system that actually ran it perfectly,” Osterloh says,referring to Google Home. “Our aim is to give our users the best possibleexperience.”

That total control is a radical shift for Google. Just look at the Nexusprogram, which was always designed as a kind of “reference platform” forother hardware manufacturers to learn what’s coming for Android. Itshowcased new processors, larger screens, and inexpensive designs. Sales tocustomers was always more of a side hustle than a core business.

“The idea was to show everyone how it should be done,” says Brian Rakowski,VP of product management for Android. “All the partners in the phonemanufacturing space took it and built great products on top of it. Meanwhile,Nexus kind of trundled along at the same small scale.” Nexus phones werealways built with a hardware partner — and they usually didn’t amount to much more than refinements and iterations on the hardware that partnerwas already making.

None of that is necessary anymore. The Nexus program has fulfilled itsmission because Android manufacturers don’t need Google to show them theway. Google currently has “no plans” to ever make another Nexus device,according to a spokesperson. Hardcore Android fans may know that HTC isthe “Original Device Manufacturer” for the Pixel, but Google says its phoneisn’t based on any HTC phone and the “seller of record” for the phone will beGoogle.

In other words, no more trundling along.



Just as the Nexus was becoming unnecessary, Google found itself with amore urgent need: to take Apple head-on, and position Android as an iPhonecompetitor in terms of sales, quality, and customer service. Enter Pixel.

Google not only designed the Pixel’s hardware — you’ll find the circular “G”logo on the back of the phone now — but also formed direct partnerships withretailers and carriers. Verizon is presumed to be the company’s exclusive USpartner, though Google will sell an unlocked version of the phone in its ownstore, complete with optional financing. Preorders begin October 4th and itwill begin shipping on October 20th.

In order to truly compete with Apple, Google will have to step up its customersupport game. When something goes wrong with your iPhone, you go to theApple Store. When you need help with the Pixel, you’ll open up the settings



and hit the support tab. Google is running a 24-hour chat and phone supportservice — and when you call in, you can opt to show the rep your screen sothey can walk you through whatever’s going wrong.

Design-wise, there’s no denying the iPhone’s influence. There are differences,of course: the bezel on the back is angled instead of curved. The fingerprintsensor is on the back, too, inside a square glass “shade” that helps you alignthe phone in your hand. The phone is also very slightly thicker at the top thanthe bottom to fit the camera without requiring a camera bump.

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“We actually did a whole bunch of things to make sure that it didn’t look toomuch like an iPhone,” Rakowski says. But from a distance (or in a case), thesimilarities are unmistakable. And so is the pricing: the Pixel fits in the high-end Android market precisely where Samsung’s exploding Note 7s left a hole.

Make no mistake, the high end is where the Pixel lives. It starts at $649 for a32GB Pixel and goes up to $869 for the larger 128GB Pixel XL. That’s likely togive people used to Nexus pricing some sticker shock, but it’s in line withApple and Samsung phones. The components in the Pixel are expensive,Osterloh admits, and therefore the phone is, too. “We didn’t want to have anycompromises in the user experience,” Osterloh says, “and so that’s why wewent to the premium end.”



Osterloh knows that “We certainly aren’t going to have enormous volumesout of this product. This is very first innings for us.” Google’s metric ofsuccess for Pixel won’t be whether it picks up significant market share, butwhether it can garner customer satisfaction and form retail and carrierpartnerships that Google can leverage for years to come.

The phones feel premium and Google has done a lot of the work to banish thebugbears that have vexed Android users for years. The 12-megapixel camerais fast and Google claims it’s great in low-light. It got a DxOMark camerascore of 89 — the best score ever given out to a phone. Though there’s nooptical image stabilization, Google tied the camera to the gyroscope toeliminate the hand-shake “jelly” effect in video. It has a new Snapdragon 821processor and 4 gigs of RAM. The camera uses lasers and phase-detection tofocus, and every photo or video you take gets saved in Google’s cloud for free,at full resolution, for life.

Google also finally reworked some of the systems behind touchresponsiveness on the display. Dave Burke, VP of engineering for Android,says that “touch latency [on the Pixel] is the best of any Android device everproduced. If you put it under high-speed camera, it’s on par with an iPhone.”(It still feels a little different to me, mainly because Android handles inertia alittle differently than iOS).

Details like latency are precisely the kind of things that get better when youcontrol the “end-to-end” experience. But where Google’s new “opinionated”approach really comes to the fore is in the software. The Pixel is the first (and,for now, the only) phone to support the new Pixel home screen, Daydreamvirtual reality, and the Google Assistant.

https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11831380/google-nexus-phone-design-more-opinionated-sundar-pichai



If the Google Assistant succeeds, it will become the next interface tocomputers and the internet. Hell, the division between those things mighteven begin to blur, abstracted underneath a helpful conversation with acapable bot.

For Scott Huffman, VP of engineering for the Google Assistant, the Assistantis important because it has the potential to change the paradigm ofcomputing from input / output into a conversation. “The conversation is theultimate interface that everyone from your three-year-old on up can do,”Huffman says.

Why doesn’t the Google Assistant have a name like Siri, Cortana, or Alexa?Huffman has patiently been answering that question the same way since thesoftware was unveiled back in May. “We felt like if we named it Suzy or



Johnny or something, that it would be too narrow,” he explains, “it would feellike yet another thing alongside the other things as opposed to what it’smeant to be, which is really an overlay across everything that we do.”

“We decided to go with ‘Google Assistant’ because we feel like it representseverything that Google does and Google is,” Huffman says. I’d already seenthe Assistant on Allo, where it was less useful than I’d hoped. Huffmanshowed it to me on a Nexus 6P customized to run it (it won’t be coming toNexus phones anytime soon). The Assistant is, in many ways, not that muchdifferent from a voice search you can do on any Android phone. You holddown the home button, ask a question, and a window slides up from thebottom with an answer. You ask the next question, and so on.

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Like Siri, you can only speak to the Assistant, not type. Unlike Siri, Google’sAssistant is surprisingly intelligent. It can understand the context of whatyou’re asking by reading the screen. It can answer questions by reading backkey sections of web pages. If you ask it for something specific that might be inan app — like “show me Beyoncé’s Instagram” — it’ll just open up Instagramand take you her account.

But where the Assistant really gets interesting is in Google Home. GoogleHome consists of a little speaker you put in your home that listens for you tosay “OK Google” and then answers your questions. (Google insists that Homedoesn’t send anything you say up to Google until it hears the keyword.) Inmany ways, Home is as big a bet as Pixel, and enters a sparser competitivefield. Its only real competition is the Amazon Echo and compared to the



Echo, Google Home has a lot of advantages. It’s cheaper, at $129, and itseems to have a higher quality set of speakers inside it, too.

It’s also smaller and cuter — you can swap out the speaker base for new onesthat better match your decor. The running joke about Home is that it lookslike a big air freshener, so I took the opportunity to needle Rishi Chandra, VPof product management for home products. He owned the comparison. “I’mnot actually offended by that,” Chandra says. Air fresheners, he says, are“consumer goods products which are explicitly designed to be actually put outin the open inside your home,” and so is Google Home.

But what really sets Home apart is Google’s smarts. Home has only twomicrophones compared to the Echo’s seven, but Chandra claims it does aneven better job of locating you and understanding your questions. Googleuses a process Chandra calls “neural beam forming,” which takes advantageof computing in cloud to identify and process your speech. Google has“simulated hundreds of thousands of different environments — noisyenvironments, quiet environments — and what we’ve done is appliedmachine learning to it,” Chandra says. You can put multiple Homes in yourhouse and only the closest one will respond to you — heck, if you have anAndroid phone, watch, and multiple Homes, Google says that it can single outthe best device to listen to you by the time you finish your request, and stopthe others from responding.

"Home has only two microphones compared to theEcho’s seven"

On Home, the Assistant really shows off how far ahead Google is compared toAlexa or Siri. You can ask it to “Play "that one song from Frozen”" and thatone song will play from YouTube. You can ask it what your day looks like, and

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it’ll tell you what’s on your calendar, list off your reminders, the weather, andthe news. You can ask it to play a YouTube video on your TV and it’llcommand your Chromecast to begin playing (Google says support for morevideo streaming services is coming). Chandra asked Home “How do I defrosta chicken?” and Home found a relevant website and read back just therelevant text.

At launch, Home will work with a few services: YouTube, Spotify, Google PlayMusic, Pandora, iHeart Radio, Nest, Philips Hue, SmartThings, and a fewmore. You can set defaults in the Google Home app — which will also controlChromecasts. But third-party developers can’t directly get on the platform theway they can with Alexa just yet. Home mostly lives in Google’s world and,annoyingly, within one Google account at a time. Huffman promises thatGoogle will open it up to third-party developers later this year — so the Echohas at least a few more months with a significant competitive advantage.

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Alongside the Pixel phones and Google Home, we’re getting our firstlook at the devices that fill out Google’s entire ecosystem: the Daydream VRheadset, a new Chromecast, and the Google Wifi home router.

Daydream isn’t launching until early November, but it’s getting its first realdemo at Google’s hardware event. It’s exclusive to the Pixel for a short timeand it’s certainly more approachable than other VR headsets. Made of fabricand designed to make it fast and simple to use, it’s easier to figure out thanthe Galaxy Gear, though of course not as powerful as an HTC Vive — you canread much more about Daydream here. The Chromecast Ultra supports 4Kand HDR and even lets you use Ethernet for its connection. It’s connected tothe Assistant insofar as it stands ready and waiting for Home to sling video atit.



"Google is building its own router"

Google Wifi is also only tangentially related to the Assistant. Google figuredpeople need good Wi-Fi to talk to it, so it made a new router that starts at just$129. Just like Google tried working with partners for the Nexus then decidedto make its own phone, Google is building its own router, too. Like the Eero,it’s designed to be used as a mesh network — you can buy a three-pack for$299, and add as many more as you like. Like Google Home, they’re designedto be inoffensive gadgets you won’t mind scattering around your house. Andlike the microphones on Google Home, Google Wifi takes advantage ofGoogle’s machine learning to better manage all the devices on your network.

For example: when you’re in a typical mesh network and you wander back toyour bedroom, your phone might not realize that there’s a much strongeraccess point it could connect to. Instead, it just stays connected to the onethat’s far away. It’s the phone’s fault (though Chandra points out that iPhonesare better at this than most), but the routers themselves could do a better jobof making your device switch. With Wifi, Chandra says, the routerscommunicate with each other, so the one that’s closer is more likely to offeritself up as the better access point. “We’re targeting a 150-millisecondtransition time,” Chandra says, “so if you’re doing a video chat and you’rewalking all the way through, you should never see a drop.”

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/23/11095610/eero-review-wi-fi-router-walt-mossberg



Google’s new batch of hardware looks like the beginning of a coherentecosystem of products. “This is a coming-out party for us, without a doubt,”Osterloh says. Instead of experiments and references, Google wants to sell itsgoods in large numbers. That’s new for Google, and it puts it in a differentcategory of competition — both with adversaries like Apple and Microsoft andwith its own manufacturing partners.

Even though Google is making its own hardware, it’s not completelyabandoning its partners. It will still be sharing the software and cloudintelligence it has developed with companies like Samsung and LG that canmake compatible phones, speakers, and routers. But this time, Google isn’tstepping out of the sales fray like it has before. It will be competing with thosepartners directly. “We’re no longer going to be shy about what we think is theright answer for us,” Chandra says. “What we are going to do is give the OEM



ecosystem a chance to compete, meaning it’s a fair playing field.”

""Our focus is absolutely on trying to drive peopleinto the Android ecosystem.""

Historically, that kind of direct competition between a software maker andhardware companies seemed like a recipe for conflict. But it doesn’t seem tohave hurt Microsoft much with its Surface line, and Google doesn’t seem tooworried that its partners will be unhappy competing with Google. “It certainlymight happen as a byproduct, but our focus is absolutely on trying to drivepeople into the Android ecosystem,” Osterloh says, “especially at thatpremium tier.”

So that’s the new playbook: Google making the first version of the hardwareitself and vertically integrating software and hardware to create the bestpossible experience. Its products sit at the high end of the market, eventuallydistributing its software downstream to other manufacturers.

Will it work? The only way to figure it out seems to be by trying. Chandra saysthat Google CEO Sundar Pichai challenged all the teams: “Let’s go prove this,can we go prove that this should be the bet that we, as a company, are goingto make.”

The bet is twofold: hardware and the Assistant. Neither is proven yet, andbetween the two I can’t help but think that the Assistant is a more significantgamble. Is Assistant the future of what it means to “just Google it”? Huffmansays that he thinks of the Assistant as “at least one of the things that has thepotential to be … what Google becomes.”

Produced by Frank Bi

http://www.theverge.com/users/Frank%20Bi



Designed by James Bareham

Edited by Michael Zelenko

http://www.theverge.com/users/James%20Bareham

http://www.theverge.com/users/mvzelenko

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