Attempt #3 at Google selling its own phones, after Nexus and Motorola, the Pixel is a high-end competitor to flagship devices like the iPhone and Galaxy S-series.
£599 for the 5in, 32GB model; higher for the 5.5in and for the 128GB models, and higher still for the 5.5in, 128GB model. Three colours.
Key selling points: built in Google Assistant, great camera, ‘Daydream VR ready’.
Daydream VR headset
Fabric-encrusted VR peripheral for the Pixel (and other phones in the future).
Slot your phone in, use the new controller, and get your VR on.
$79, three colours.
Google Home
Google’s Amazon Echo competitor.
It’s Google’s Amazon Echo competitor.
$129, US only.
Chromecast Ultra
4K Chromecast.
If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need it.
Rishi out, Scott in. Scott’s talking about Google Assistant some more, and how it works with external partners.
“The Google Assistant will be Google’s next thriving, open ecosystem”, Scott says. Developers can build “actions on Google” (which seem like Skills on the Echo): either they’re direct actions, or conversations.
‘The Google Assistant will be Google’s next thriving, open ecosystem’ … Scott Huffman speaks about Google Assistant. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
A direct action is simple enough: Google passes the request (“turn on the lights”, or “play Blue Suede Shoes”) on to the service, which does it. A conversation is more complex, and requires a back and forth. Scott’s example is Uber: “Book an Uber” needs a few questions to be asked before it can be carried out.
“The real beauty is how actions will scale”, says Scott, “letting partners reach people through the Google Assistant everywhere.”
More importantly, you don’t have to pre-install the actions. “Just ask Google for what you want, and it will find out how to do it”. That’s either going to be amazing, or a total nightmare, depending on how it’s handled. If you say “book a ride” and there’s an Uber and a Lyft action, what does it do? Who knows. (Google knows)
Rishi continues. Fourth area: home control. If you have a smart home (you probably do not have a smart home) you can control it with your voice. Not only Google’s sibling company Nest, but also a few other companies, like Philips.
But the definition of “smart home” has grown: you can also use Google Assistant to control your Chromecast. Apparently it can “completely change how you watch television”. I doubt that, but OK. You can control YouTube, but “soon” you’ll be able to control Netflix, and you can ask the Google Home to show your pics in Google Photos on your Chromecast.
This is one of the few areas we’ve seen today where Apple is beating Google: all this TV stuff is fairly baked in to the Apple TV, and that device launched with support for much more than just voice control of YouTube.
Rishi Chandra discusses the Google Home device in San Francisco. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
It’s also interesting how much Google is blurring the boundaries between the devices. Google Home’s features are the Chromecast’s are Chromecast Audio are Google Photos: Rishi isn’t distinguishing.
Current count of distinguishing features: seven.
Google Home can do smart multi-room audio, which the Echo can’t do, and it can do smart multi-room listening, which the Echo can do.
Current count of distinguishing features: eight.
But, oh no! Turns out you can change your default music service (my bad), so back down to a final score of seven.
That’s it. Amazon’s got a fight on its hands – but only in the US. The device is launching for $129 there, but nowhere else. In retail stores November 4, and it comes in seven colours.
And finally, Google Home. It’s a little cylinder that brings Google Assistant into your home. It has speakers that lets you play music, and has a lot of mics that offer “best in class voice recognition”. It’s … look, it’s the Amazon Echo.
Home … Google’s answer to the Amazon Echo. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
That’s good! The Amazon Echo is a great product. But it’s weird hearing Google entering a category currently defined by one product, without really talking about how their offering is different.
Mario hands over to Rishi Chandra, who’s shows off pre-recorded demos. It can play music (in this case, YouTube music), and you can control that with your voice. It also does other streaming options, like Spotify and Google Play Music. Yes, Google has two streaming music options. No, I don’t really know why either. You also can listen to podcasts, or cast audio to the Assistant.
Current count of distinguishing features against the Echo: two. You can change your default music service, and you can ask it very vague questions, like “play that Shakira song from Zootopia”.
Adele … singer of Hello. Or should that be, Allo? Photograph: George Pimentel/Getty Images for BT PR
On to “getting answers from Google”. He’s doxing Adele onstage (“what is Adele’s real name”), and asking how many Grammys she has. This is one of those tricky areas for comparison: the Echo can do the same thing, but it looks likely that the Google Assistant will be better. At least until Amazon improves Alexa. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Google is much better when it comes to searching for the physical world, though: “what are some nearby camping stores” gets a solid answer with your physical location taken into account, and you can ask it how long it will take to cycle to your favourite one.
Oh, and “How do I say ‘I would like a beer please’ in Spanish?” gets an answer, in Spanish.
Current count of distinguishing features: let’s say 4.5
Next up: organisation. If you want, Assistant will read your emails and calendar, and offer you a personalised precis of your day. This is the sort of thing which is either incredibly cool, or incredibly creepy, and will probably move from the latter to the former as we all get jaded and ignore privacy concerns. Cool!
You can also build a shopping list, but come on, Amazon wins on shopping.
You can ask it to flip a coin. I don’t know if the Echo can do that. I’m sorry. I’m a fraud.
Current count of distinguishing features: let’s say six.
Entertainment next: Remember Chromecast, the company’s dongle for letting you watch stuff on your TV. There’s a new one! Chromecast Ultra.
Mario Queiroz introduces the Google Chromecast Ultra. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
It has 4K ultra-HD, HDR, and Dolby Vision support. If you have a super-expensive TV, you likely know whether you have those things. If you aren’t sure, you probably don’t. It comes with an ethernet port, because lets be honest, your Wi-Fi can’t really handle 4K streaming; it’s 1.8x faster for actually navigating menus etc.
It’ll cost $69. No information on international launches, but our own Samuel Gibbs tells me it’ll launch in the UK for £69. (Thank you, Brexit)
Clay out, Mario in. We’re going to hear about Google Home.
Google’s vice president of product management Mario Queiroz introduces the Google Home device. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
“Connectivity, entertainment, and Google Assistant” are the three areas we’re going to hear about.
Connectivity first: Last year, Google launched fancy new OnHub routers, which you can’t really get outside the US. Apparently they’re good, US-based people tell me. Anyway, now we get Google Wi-Fi, a Google-developed Wi-Fi access point.
It’s basically Google’s Airport Extreme: It can do mesh networking to extend your Wifi, and it can help you get online. There’s also an app, which you can use to be an evil dad and kick your kids off the wifi when it’s time to eat dinner.
It’ll cost $129, or $299 for three. But it looks US only.
Clay out, Adrienne in. She leads VR partnerships, and will be showing some Daydream ‘experiences’.
There’s a Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them experience, which is going to sell a few thousand Daydream headsets on its own. If you’re over 30 that’s the Harry Potter prequel.
There’s a new game by Eve Online creators CCP, Gunjack 2. That’s a fairly good way of positioning Daydream: Real VR devices, like Oculus and Vive, run Eve: Valkyrie, a full dogfighting sim, while more stripped-down devices get Gunjack.
Hulu! If you fancy watching TV on a phone less than an inch from your face ... Photograph: Dan Goodman/AP
There’s Hulu, if you fancy watching TV on a phone less than an inch from your face, and the New York Times app, because other newspapers exist. And there’s Google, of course: Movies, Photos, Street View, and YouTube. YouTube itself has a heck of a lot of 360˚ Video, which some people love and some people hate, although Google seems to be calling it “VR content” these days.
It’s pretty simple: “You just want to pop your phone in and get into VR”. The headset and phone speak wirelessly, and the headset has an auto-calibration feature.
There’s a controller too. A clickable touchpad at the top, two buttons in the middle, and a bunch of motion-sensitive sensors inside. But: “what do you do with a controller after you use it? You lose it. So the controller has a home inside the headset.”
‘It’s the little things that make the experience’ … Clay Bavor introduces the Daydream View VR headset. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
Then he drops the controller, literally mid-way through saying “it’s the little things that make the experience”. Poor Clay.
The headset will work with every Daydream-ready phone. Pixel is the first, but there’ll be more. Oh, and it’s coming in three colours.
Sabrina out. Clay in! He runs VR. “We love VR,” he says, “because unlike anything else we’ve seen, it can put you someplace else”. Given Google literally makes a car, I think he might have picked the wrong metaphor there.
Clay Bavor is talking Daydream, Google’s new VR platform. “Let’s start with phones: we’ve made the Pixels great for VR. They’re the first that are ‘Daydream ready’”.
Google’s Daydream viewer. Photograph: Google
“Let’s talk about the headset. We have a bit of a different take.” He brings out Daydream View, the company’s first VR headset. It doesn’t look like that much of a different take, tbh: you still put your phone in there, strap it to your face, and hope that you don’t throw up.
Still, “we looked to fabrics, not gadgets, for inspiration”, he says. “In fact, we worked with clothing designers to get the fabrics just right”. It weighs 30% less than “comparable devices”, and fits over glasses. That’s cool if you wear glasses.
Sabrina Ellis talks about the ‘quick charging’ Pixel at Google’s launch. Photograph: Google
Battery life: “We spent a lot of time optimising Pixel to be smart about battery life,” she says, “and it can get seven hours of charge in fifteen minutes.”
Automatic updates: it has them.
24/7 customer support, with a screen share option: it has that too.
Switching support: it has that as well. “We built a tool to quickly let you transfer contacts, photos, videos, music, texts and even you iMessages.” You physically plug it in to your old iPhone. There’s going to be some cool hacky stuff to get that working, I think, and it will be interesting to see how Apple responds.
Sizes: 5” and 5.5”
Colours: Quite Black, Very Silver, and Really Blue (they aren’t lying about that last one, and I can’t decide if I love or hate it)
Specs: I just took a screenshot of that, here you go:
The specs. Photograph: Google
Carriers: Verizon exclusive in the US, EE exclusive in the UK, but also avialable unlocked from the Google store.
Price: $649 and up, £599 and up. Available for pre order today in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia, and India shortly.
Next, Brian talks us through the camera. “Pixel received the highest rating ever for a smartphone” from industry group DXOMark – 89 compared to the iPhone 7’s 86. That’s doubly impressive given, you know, no camera nubbin.
Brian Rakowski: ‘Pixel received the highest rating ever for a smartphone.’ Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
New features:
F2.0 aperture with 12 megapixel sensor! So it can take sharp pictures, quickly
Smartburst! The pixel takes a lot of images and picks the best one.
HDR plus! A multiple-exposure, pixel by pixel composite that lets you photograph in low light or high contrast environments.
Low shutter lag! Apparently the lowest of any they’ve tested.
Video stabilisation! “This works by sampling the gyroscope at 200 times per second, and instantaneously compensating each part of the image”
Built-in Google photos! Free, unlimited online storage, with ANOTHER dig at Apple: no more ‘storage full’ alerts.
It looks like quite a good camera, all things considered.
Brian Rakowski from Google steps in to talk us through the Pixel. Hi Brian!
First up, Assistant: “You can just say the hot-word, or press and hold the home button, to bring it up.” He asks it to show his photos from last October, and sees a picture of a show he went to last year. That prompts him to ask what’s happening at that venue now, and he sees the band The Lumineers. So he asks it to play a song from them too, and a YouTube video pops up.
Brian Rakowski speaks about the Pixel phone. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters
He likes the song, so he texts his wife to ask if she wants to see them. She does! Brian’s got a date. But his wife suggests a meal at a restaurant he doesn’t know about, Marzano. Conveniently, this allows Ryan to demonstrate another Assistant feature – it’s almost like this is all rehearsed – where he can tap on the screen and bring up more information about anything mentioned there.
Google Assistant can do more, though: he asks it to make a reservation at Marzano, and it does. A full OpenTable reservation, placed and confirmed, all through a voice communication with the service.
It’s pretty cool. Hopefully Brian’s perfectly planned life represents yours, because if it does, this service will change your world.
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