Gadgetory

we're here at Google's campus in Mountain View to talk to the team behind the Nexus line of products we're gonna take a look at what goes into making these products and where the company goes from here it's actually going to be very exciting year for us because instead of having a single Nexus device we actually have a family of Nexus devices we work the seuss leading up to this summer to launch the Nexus 7 and now we're going to show you a device that we've partnered with LG on and a device that was partnered with Samsung this is Nexus 4 which is our new flagship Nexus phone that's the official name that is the official little leaks the leaks have been right why am I even here I don't know I'm here for you obviously Android being really you know a platform but also an ecosystem it's all about partnerships you know that's how Google really gets our innovations out to users as their partners my name is Patrick Brady and I run our Android partner engineering team I'm actually super excited this Christmas because it's like finally we have a Nexus portfolio that is worthy of the Nexus name do you feel that previous devices were not up to your standards in terms of build quality I think the previous devices the technology wasn't there and we weren't able to push ourselves hard enough but this year the partners that we chose really brought amazing technology to the table and they were willing to go you know the what is it the last mile the ultimate mile they were able to strip the extra mile you know when we build the Nexus devices we really do form one team so we have you know the Android engineering team building the next release of the Android platform and at the same time we have our hardware partners on-site actually downstairs in this building working together making sure that you know we're building the best possible hardware for our next Nexus devices and we have the best possible software experience what we're doing in 4.2 is we're actually bringing the widget framework from the home screen to the lock screen so that you can do things before you actually unlock your phone I scroll to the right from the edge of the screen here I can go into my camera if I scroll to the left I have all my widgets here I've got my inbox I've got my my sound search widget here so if I hear a song in a bar and I immediately want to know what it is I don't have to unlock the device I'm gonna add widget here and let's say I'm going to put on calendar Laxmi in an obviously from any of these lock screens if you want to get through just swipe up bring up the the actual unlock UI and then one important new thing here on the notification shade is this icon on the top right that gets you into quick settings so the screen just flips and gives you access to things that you need you know often like Wi-Fi Bluetooth configuration and if you really if you really want to get into it there very quickly instead of swiping down on the notification station pressing that icon you could just swipe down with two fingers Google now was one of the hero features of jellybean even back in June when we announced it what we're doing is we're continuing as we said continuing add new Google now cards with new and more interesting things so what Google now is doing right now is when you receive an email that contains a delivery you know deliver details with a tracking number it takes that tracking number for you and puts it on a card that basically says this package is shipped if you want to track it just tap here and that'll take you directly to the website of you know whoever whichever career is being used so what what we're doing in this new version of Google now if you've received a confirmation email for your flight Google now you can pick up that information about the flight save it and then when the right type and the right time comes and the right time is the day of your flight it then shows you this car similarly if you get a hotel confirmation email Google now will pick up those details for you and display them on the day of that reservation so you've got the the reservation details in so next is four it's got Gorilla Glass two front and back it's got two deglass on the front so it's got a little curve to it the device is really just all about the glass are you worried about break these things breaking because you know glass is a tendency to break so one of the things that we've done with this product is we've paid a lot of attention to how you hold it and how the center frame protects it so the the center frame actually protects the glass when it's resting down here it also comes up to the edge of the glass and surrounds it on the backside and it's carefully curved up there even though it looks like it's got a little chamfer on there that chamfer edge is really nicely rounded so it fits really nice in your hand the previous Nexus phones we curved the glass to fit the way that you talked on the phone but this device is really much more focused about how you interact of the phone so the curve happens on the edges and that means that it's really well suited for all the types of interactions that you do with an Android device all the swipe gestures especially the swipes that come from the edges just kind of naturally glide in 4.2 we're adding another method of typing which we call gesture typing so this is Alex white whether it's you know like swipe or or not I think is less interesting because we've actually spent a significant amount of time thinking about how this thing should work we do real-time gesture recognition so the recognizer is running at all times it's collecting every grit single data point from your fingers gliding on the keyboard and then recalculate and recalculating recalculating so what we do is we put what you think you're typing on this little square that shows up where your finger is so at all points in time you're looking where your finger is going and you've seen what it's telling you all right so it's pretty unique so Nexus 4 has an 8 megapixel rear facing sensor Sony BSI sensor and will be supporting HDR and we have some cool new panorama modes that I think you guys will like so here is Cameron Andrew 4.2 we took everything out of the shot like we all these knobs and controls and things that we used to have they're all gone picture right there I can swipe back into it there's a shot fantastic you know I can't apply some filters to it right here so I think you're gonna look great bleach and other things it's right there so that's done that seems a duplicate right they'll be the original and the original will still be there yeah now the other thing that we did was we have these accelerator gestures in camera now so if I want to for example change my flash setting I can just hold and then swipe to turn it on and it's given if I just want to turn it off and that'll locate anywhere yeah so I can do it down here I can do it up here for since I see a so for about a year because ice cream sales we've had panorama mode but we've wanted to do a lot more than that because we think a panorama still doesn't capture the entire scene so we're barring from some of the technology that we built for Street View to build a completely new approach to taking these immersive photos and that's called photosphere what is full resolution it depends on how many images you've captured into your you know but it could be tens of can we see can we see those people over on the left that's pretty cool I've had pretty crazy how's it terrifying I would be worried about that man we look for the partners that we really see innovating in specific areas and so we really liked what LG was doing with a couple different technologies specifically around inductive charging some of their display technologies and just some of the devices we saw them bringing out and looked like great hardware platforms for us to really showcase the next version of Android and this is our newest duck our wireless dock the webOS fed over here losing it this is still a pre-production sample actually all the devices I'm showing you or not the actual final final hardware because that's how we roll around here but this is our inductive charging dock there's an inductive coil on the device and it works just like a charger some of the devices are partners you know come and pitch to us they want to work with us on Nexus devices and we have lots of partners coming to us and proposing new designs we typically look at that and we have an idea on the hardware side we have things we like we have things we don't like about it and we work with them to refine that Nexus 7 we really worked with Sue's to change kind of the grip and the radius of all the curves and the vessel so that had a great feel in your hand we did a similar kind of process back and forth with LG on the Nexus 4 as well as with Samsung on the Nexus 10 what is this is Nexus 10 which is a 10-inch super high-resolution tablet it's 8.9 millimeters 603 grams and curved to fit your hands the Nexus 10 has a 2560 by 1600 screen early on we said we have to have this screen it's gorgeous and we needed a chip that could power that and the only one we found out there was the Exynos 5 50 to 50 from Samsung with Nexus 10 we set out to figure out okay well how do we get something that is just as comfortable as Nexus 7 was but in this large size and so that's why we focused on the details of how the product fits and feels in your hand it has kind of this camera body gunmetal finish on it this isn't a metallized back that's gonna just slip out of hand this is something that you can really easily comfortably hold one-handed at kind of an incredible angle because the back really grips your hand it's actually kind of a nice finish it's weird but it's so you're so you're saying this is this is plastic this is just a single piece of plastic it's a single piece yeah but you're kind of touting that which is usually people are like we made it look less like plastic but this is a this is a beautiful piece of plastic that is essential to making this device so light you know a 300 pixel per inch green you know in the abstract it's just a metric on sort of a tech specs sheet but when you bring your Google Play content together with it what it means is I can open up the magazine's reader and get a beautiful high def magazine experience with beautiful pictures you know very crisp clear text all that sort of stuff really kind of bringing together how play content works in conjunction with the hardware and the software one of the amazing things about this screen is its resolution it's basically print the other way that we sort of have been trying to evolve in google play is thinking about discovery within the store now there's a new feature we call the music Explorer that allows you to look at similar artists of the genre across the store to get some you know different ideas of bands maybe that you hadn't heard about that you would like to know about when I was a kid my father had this console radio in our living room this gigantic piece of furniture and it had this huge knob that you can spin and it would sort of whip across a dozen radio stations at once and so we thought like how could we bring that sort of more of an analog discovery experience to the tablet you don't wanna make a big like analog looking knob that you could flip through were there early were there early designs that were we're not really about the brushed aluminum so much but you know I think it's actually kind of an interesting thing to to bring you know an explorer that has a vibe that's pretty close to the Android aesthetic right I mean I think we're actually you know trying to you know come up with what this certain sort of feel to our UI and one that is really you know informed by the cloud and not the sort of you know literalness of a radio sitting on your desk I feel like you guys have been promising a tablet software for a couple of years now will you have the software and can it be a more attractive price point than the $500 $600 tablets that are on the market doing essentially the same thing well I don't think anybody is doing this nobody has a tablet that this thing nobody has a tablet that is this light and nobody has a tablet at this resolution and all that said it's going to be very competitively priced what about the apps one of the reasons why we were happy with Nexus 7 coming out first is because we really wanted to excite the Android ecosystem about the possibility of tablets apps that are designed with a tablet in mind for Nexus 7 we're great on this so you can almost think of Nexus 7 as a bit of a bootstrap to the ecosystem part of the reason why you know we've invested significantly billing what you're holding is exactly so that we have you know more and more motivation to the developer community to do that like we you know we are we don't we don't go out and pay people to do stuff like we would never do that that's not how Google developer relations works but you know we are trying as hard as we can to develop this ecosystem and you know when there's a significant number or even a trend towards a significant number of tablets like this in the market people will see it Android without these Nexus devices would not be possible and and that story of you know what used to be called lead devices right way back with the t-mobile g1 with HTC has evolved into more of a brand for end-users so that is Nexus and that's I think incredibly important to Android as a whole in the Android development effort ultimately it is up to the ecosystem we can only go so far by ourselves you you