Google Archive

Google unveiled a whole slew of new hardware products today, most notably its Pixel phones. You already know all the specifications and how it looks, so I won't bore you with the specifications details. Two good points about the Pixel phones: they come with easy on-device access to 24/7 phone and chat support with real Google people (...but what if it doesn't boot?), and it has a supposedly really great camera with no bump.

The bad news about the Pixel? The pricing. Oh boy the pricing. The small Pixel costs a whopping €759, the bigger Pixel costs €869 (German pricing). That's absolutely crazytown, and I simply don't know if the Google brand has what it takes, hardware-wise, to go toe-to-toe with Samsung and Apple. More bad news: it's barely available anywhere. It's only available in the few markets where iOS is really strong (US, UK, Canada, Australia), and Germany, but nowhere else. Not in the rest of mainland Europe (an Android stronghold), not in Japan, not in China, not in South America (another Android stronghold).

As a Dutch person, this is especially grating because virtually all of these goods are shipped to Europe from the port of Rotterdam, where they lie in warehouses before being shipped off. But not to The Netherlands. Anyhow, I just find it perplexing that in 2016, product launches are still nation state-restricted.

Honestly though, I like the Pixel phones. I was a little apprehensive when looking at the leaks, but with the higher-quality announcements, product videos, and hands-on photos and videos coming out, it's starting to grow on me. I definitely would have liked a more outspoken design, but then I remember that the best modern smartphone I've ever had was my beloved, cherished Nexus 5 - not exactly a beacon of extravagance - which just feels great in the hand, mostly thanks to the excellent type of plastic used on the orange-red model I have, but also thanks to its unassuming, generic shape.

Maybe I don't know what I want. I deeply dislike the design of my pink iPhone 6S (except for the pink, of course, that's still awesome), but at the same time, it feels pretty great in the hand, so I can't really fault Apple or Google or Samsung sticking to the generic, default shape we've settled on. The same applies to my current phone - a Nexus 6P - which is a pretty 'safe' design, too.

Google also unveiled - again - Google Home, its Alexa competitor, and an updated version of ChromeCast, which can now stream 4K video. They also demonstrated the first Daydream VR headset, which uses a Google Pixel - or any other future Daydream-compatible Android phone - as its display. Tying all of these devices together is Google Assistant, a souped-up Google Now with a conversational interface. It's difficult to say how useful Google Assistant will be beyond the staged demos. Like the Pixel, these devices are only available to a very small group of people - the US, mostly - save for the new ChromeCast.

So, why is Google getting into the hardware game for real this time?

I'd like to add something to that dictum: you have to make sure people can actually buy your stuff. Google has a lot of work to do on that one.

Remember when Google said they wouldn't store messages in one of the company's new chat applications, Allo? Yeah, no.

For this reason alone, don't use Google Allo. But wait, there's more! There's also the backwards way it handles multiple devices and phone numbers - another reason to not use Google Allo. Sadly, even if you don't have Allo installed, you may still be forced to deal with it at some point because of some 'clever' tricks by Google Play Services on Android. If someone sends you an Allo message, but you don't have Allo installed, you'll get a special Android notification.

Don't use Google Allo.

In light of our discussion a week ago about how computers have trouble with non-standard dialects and accents, it's interesting to note that according to Quartz, Google is recruiting Scottish people - through a third party company called Appen - to record their own voice.

That's one way of doing it, I guess - but I just don't see how this will make any meaningful dent in broader terms. Getting relatively standard Google Now commands to better recognise people with Scottish accents is very welcome for our friends in the beautiful country of Scotland, but I don't think this will scale very well beyond a limited set of standard Google Now commands (I didn't call Siri and Google Now "slow and cumbersome command line interfaces" for nothing), let alone other English accents and dialects or those of other languages.

Unless, perhaps, Google is planning on doing this for numerous dialects and languages, at which point I wish them good luck - they might be done with English by the time the sun explodes.

Update: interesting summary of the repository - "So, the stack seems to be: Dart is the language for GUI apps, Flutter provides the widgets, and Escher renders the layers."

Something intriguing: a new open source operating system from Google, Fuchsia, has found its way to Google's repositories. There's pretty much no information anywhere about this, and maybe I'm making way too much of this, but until we know more - anybody care to speculate?

There's a Fuchsia file that just reads "Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)", so that's not much help. There's documentation on the kernel, Magenta, which may be of more use - it reads, among other things, "Magenta targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of ram with arbitrary peripherals doing open ended computation." There's probably a lot more documentation in the repository, but I don't have the proper background to infer too much from what's going on.

Another very, very intriguing piece of information: it turns out several big names from the operating system industry (is that even a thing?) are involved - people who worked on NewOS, BeOS, Danger, iOS, and Palm's webOS, such as Travis Geiselbrecht and Brian Swetland.

This could be "just" a research project, or something more. Very interesting.

There really seem to be two groups of people: those that value the openness of Google regarding the data it collects, giving you insight and control over it, and those that value the secrecy of Apple, trying to keep everything on your device in a way that it can't be tracked to you.

The debate passes me by, because I treat my devices as if they are public devices; I don't put anything on there that I don't want other to see, read, or know about. A device is not my mind, so I don't treat it as such. I don't trust any company - Google, Apple, my carrier, or whatever - and I have enough understanding of technology to know that nothing connected to the internet is really private or safe.

The idea of "trusting" a company with my deepest private data is wholly alien to me.

I've never really been able to form an opinion on Nest's products - they seem kind of interesting, but I just don't see myself paying that much for a thermostat or a fire alarm.

Good.

We're coming for you.

I absolutely hate this change. I deeply, deeply, deeply hate this change. This is a classic case of instead of addressing the core problem - web forms shouldn't lose their content when you navigate back and forth - you just try to hide it a little more by making navigation harder.

Emblematic of software development today, especially in operating systems: instead of fixing core problems, let's just add more layers to hide the ugliness. You see it everywhere - from still relying on an operating system written for timesharing machines with punchcards, to trying to hide broken, complicated and obtuse file system layouts behind "just use convoluted cloud storage".

People carrying around ugly battery packs just to get through a day of use on their devices running an outdated timesharing mainframe punchcard operating system from the '60s tells you all you need to know about the complete failure of modern software development - and this tiny little change in Chrome only underlines it.

Good software does not exist.

This is why, despite rumblings, we've not yet seen Apple allowing iOS users to set default applications.

The day Apple allows this, we're going to see a whole lot of Google iPhones.

No better microcosm of the complete and utter ineptitude of the US government to implement, maintain, and modernise infrastructure than the US cable industry. I still can't believe that the internet in the US is as dreadfully horrible as it is.

If it takes Google to break the deadlock, so be it - even though it shouldn't be a profit-hungry company to do so.

I hope Google is finally getting serious about hardware. I can't wait for more Pixel laptops, tablets, desktops, and smartphones.

That being said, as much as the Pixel devices generally get great reviews, they aren't exactly massive sales hits, and Google also has a shaky history when it comes to its hardware efforts. We'll have to see how this pans out, but it'll be interesting to see what's going to roll out of this 65th attempt at Google getting serious about hardware.

Google is, effectively, a monoculture, and that's a huge sticking point for the company's future. The company's surely got a number of endeavours that could prove hugely profitable in the future (e.g. its driverless car technology), but that's still a considerable number of years in the future.

For a company with what is probably the biggest server infrastructure in the world, it seems like a logical place to look.

Vizio, the successful American TV maker, has created a very interesting solution to the smart TV problem. Instead of building yet another smart TV platform or using Android TV, the company has worked very closely with Google these past two years to integrate Chromecast - renamed today to just Google Cast - right into the TV. Vizio then ships a pretty good Android tablet alongside their TV, with all the Google Cast stuff you already know from Chromecast built right in.

This is exactly what a smart TV should be. I have a Chromecast - the current hockey puck model - and it's probably one of the best technology products I've ever owned. It's so simple and elegant, and it just works. Now that I have it, I can't imagine ever having gone without it. Instead of shoving yet another ugly box underneath my TV or learning and installing apps on yet another platform, I can just use the damn phone in my pocket. Why would I want it any other way?

Vizio and Google have been smart about this whole thing too. The Google Cast portion of the TV is isolated from everything else, and updates comes straight from Google, so it's always up to date and in line with any other Google Cast device.

The big upsaide for both Vizio and consumers? They don't have to worry at all about getting deals with content creators and owners.

Brilliant, and the future of smart TVs. These silly anachronistic glorified settop boxes like Android TV and the Apple TV? They are relics, old-world thinking. A TV should be a dumb screen ready to receive input from my phone or tablet, and Vizio built just that.

All they need to do now is ship to Europe.

There's something happening with Chromebooks that seems to take place much outside of the sphere of the technology press - in schools now, but once kids have them, they'll find their way elsewhere. We may indeed be entering a post-PC world, but it's not based on tablets.

It's Chromebooks.