Indeed. And who's to say they even want to work so tightly with them? It's pretty clear that they mostly bought it for patent defense. Anything else is mostly icing. Personally, I'm one of those pie in the sky optimists who wants them to turn all those disgustingly awful Motorola set top boxes into Google TVs (if they have enough power). Sadly, I'm also a pessimist who thinks that will never happen.


As for the announcements here, I think the Nexus 7 is a huge deal. No, I don't think it'll make a huge dent in the Kindle Fire, but it'll make enough of one. Think of all the people out there with a family member who knows tech. Are any of them going to get advised that a Kindle Fire is a better deal than the Nexus 7? Is anyone here?

The great thing is that someone could, with no problems at all, simply move from a Fire to a Nexus 7. They can then install the Amazon App Store, and have access to everything they had on their Fire PLUS the much bigger Android Play store, PLUS have all the great Google proprietary apps that they're missing so greatly. My wife hates the email experience on her Fire. This would eliminate that problem.

I think the Nexus 7 is going to be a huge deal, as long as Google can get enough word out.


But that's kind of where my praise of this set of announcements ends. The rest was kind of blah, and there is no chance that the Nexus Q will sell enough to stick around long. That thing is a failure right out of the gate (wow, I sounded like Bruno there!). But it's okay, I feel like every company gets their own "iPod HiFi" (there, I'm back).

Other than that, I wasn't blown away by the other announcements. I really don't think we're quite "there" yet when it comes to those usage scenarios they were showing off, like when they showed how your phone would know your meeting has been cancelled so you could go for your usual workout. These kind of "features" assume two things: that the signals are there/reliable enough (always updated and in the correct format), and that you have a life that can be predicted like this. My schedule is so erratic that my phone wouldn't have a damn clue what to tell me. I'd end up sitting at my computer in the morning, having my phone warn me about traffic on a road I didn't plan to drive on that day.

I was hoping we'd see a stronger competitor to Siri. What happened to Majel?


Ah well, at least that Glass video was pretty rad...