Made by Google 2018: It’s About More Than Hardware (Premium)

This week, Google announced new smartphones, Chromebooks, and smart home devices. But if that’s all you got from the event, you’re missing the point.

As I noted after last year’s Google hardware event, what the search giant is really doing is establishing itself as the leader in modern platforms, thanks largely to its AI prowess. And while this week’s event was ostensibly about new hardware, Google was really just pushing AI, software, and for the first time so explicitly, even design.

“Delivering information has always been in our DNA,” Rick Osterloh said at the Made by Google 2018 launch event, marking Google’s 20th anniversary. “We love [solving] really hard problems that make life easier for people in big and small ways … That focus has caused us to push into many new areas.”

Given Google’s primary user-facing service, Internet search, it is perhaps not surprising that the firm has emerged as an AI leader. To be successful, Google needs to understand context, to be able to translate languages on the fly, and to connect people to the information they want instantaneously.

All this work forms the backdrop, the foundation, of Google’s hardware offerings. That is, Google doesn’t just make phones, or computers, or smart home devices. It makes devices that mold to their users’ needs and preferences, and become more valuable over time.

“Your devices understand you when you talk to them,” Osterloh said. “From searching, to translating, to getting a great photo of the world, when we see an opportunity to help people, we go the extra mile. Our deep investment in AI over many years is at the core of our ability to push forward in many areas at once.”

And it’s not just AI. Increasingly, we expect our most personal devices to evoke feelings of warmth, humanity, and familiarity as well. We want them to work well, for sure, but we also want them to look great. To blend into our homes, and into our lives.

So, yes. There are new versions of existing products. Entirely new products. But there are also new AI-powered features. New colors and textures. New shapes and form factors. The real power of Google’s aggressive advances lies in the combinations of these things. In the software, the services. In the AI, as before. But in the design as well.

With all that in mind, here are some of my key takeaways from Google’s event this week.

This is really about trust

While I understand that many readers will viscerally disagree with this notion, Google’s push into consumer hardware products is really part of a wider effort that centers on trust. That is, users of Google’s online services—and now its hardware products—must trust the company to do the right thing for them.

Osterloh never framed it this way. But the three tenets he did mention—basically personalization, security, and digital wellbeing—all speak to this notion of trust.

That is, Google’s users trust that their Google experiences will be deeply personalized to them. To provide them with what Google designer Ivy Ross said was “what it’s like to hold Google in your hand.”

Google’s users must believe that the firm is committed to the security of its users at every level. And Google described how its Titan security platform, which spans from the datacenter to its devices in a sort of “intelligent cloud, intelligent edge”-type system, creates “a closed loop” for security within this ecosystem.

And Google’s users must feel they are in control of their digital wellbeing, a big focus on Android 9 Pie in particular. This includes app limits and notification relief for individuals, of course, but also simple controls for family screen time for parents.

Design matters

This, to me, was the biggest change, year-over-year, from last year’s Google hardware event: Like Amazon, the firm is really pushing its own design prowess. But in Google’s case, it’s not just in hardware.

“We’ve seen incredible progress in Material Design, our adaptable open source system of guidelines, tools, and components that support the best practices of user interface design,” Osterloh said. “This year’s new devices fit perfectly with the rest of the family [from a design standpoint]. Our design team really pushed us to think about how our hardware products can be designed for the world you live in today.”

Designer Ivy Ross noted that “Google design’s language is bold and optimistic, and human in its forms, colors, and shapes.” There are soft circles and curves, which she says evoke something natural and familiar.

“[These devices] will eventually be invisible,” she said, noting that Google was in the middle of a transition and that the devices it makes now must fit as naturally as possible into our homes and our lives.

Not a smart home, a thoughtful home

We’re all familiar with the notion of a smart home. But Google is moving past that into something more sophisticated, the “thoughtful home.” A thoughtful home isn’t just smart. It’s helpful and simple enough for everyone to set up and use,” Osterloh noted.

This work started with Nest. But with Nest now in-house and part of Google’s broader hardware efforts, the firm has “reimagined Google for the home,” Diya Jolly said. This includes smart displays, like Google’s new Home Hub. Which, incidentally, doesn’t have a camera because of privacy concerns. Now you can use it in private places, like the bedroom, as well as more communal spaces, like the kitchen.

Google’s Home Hub also uses something called “ambient EQ” to fine-tune its display brightness and color to the room. It turns off automatically at night. And uses voice match so that it’s personalized for each user. You know, thoughtful.

Home Hub also includes a dashboard—literally, the hub—from which you can centrally manage all of the smart devices in your home from a single location. This means you will no longer need to use separate apps for everything or seek out a third-party hub app like Wink. Its Google Home mobile app is also being redesigned in a like fashion, which is smart.

Google’s phones are all about photography

For the first time, Google’s standard- and large-sized Pixel 3 phones are identical other than size, the notch on the Pixel 3 XL notwithstanding. And I’m hoping that this new shared foundation will result in better reliability than I experienced with last year’s Pixel 2 XL. Google talked up some interesting Pixel-only and Pixel-first features at the event this week, including much-needed call screening functionality. But the obvious focus here is on photography.

If you paid attention to Apple’s recent iPhone launch event, you may have heard the firm talk up something called computational photography. But Google has been doing this for years, and as the firm noted, the world’s smartest smartphone camera system is getting even better this year with the Pixel 3.

“The Pixel camera is a true end-to-end combination of our AI, software, and hardware,” Brian Pakowski noted during the Pixel segment of the event. “We’re building on Google’s deep expertise in computational photography.”

In Pixel 3, this expertise shows itself in several ways. And many of these features use Google’s unique Pixel Visual Core hardware componentry to do their magic.

For example, all Pixel phones have provided a feature called HDR+ that algorithmically combines several quick burst photos into a single ideal image. But a new feature for Pixel 3 called Top Shot builds on HDR+ and uses on-device machine learning to pick the best photo from those bursts so you always get the best possible results.

Likewise, a new Pixel 3 feature called Super Res Zoom solves the quality problem with digital zoom by utilizing burst photos algorithmically create a beautifully zoomed-in shot. Other smartphone makers, meanwhile, are stuck with 2X optical zoom.

A new feature called Night Sight seeks to improve the Pixel line’s already-stellar low-light photography skills by using machine learning to eliminate the need for a flash. This one wasn’t very well explained, honestly. But it’s supposed to arrive next month, on Pixel 3 and previous Pixel handsets too.

And for selfies, the Pixel 3 actually provides two cameras, which enables a super-wise group selfie mode that eliminates the need for a selfie-stick, always a positive.

There are so many AI-powered photo experiences in Pixel 3 that Google didn’t even spend time describing most of them at the event. But I’ll be looking more closely at all of this in my coming review.

More?

Google also talked up its new Pixel Slate, but I wasn’t particularly impressed by this me-too device. I get it: Chrome OS is maturing to the point where Google can make a Surface Pro competitor. But I don’t see this particular form factor as being particularly compelling for Google’s users. And am not particularly interested personally.

More soon.