Live coverage from TheVerge

Yesterday, Verizon announced the new Motorola Droid phones, which have a bunch of new features that will presumably appear in every Android device (coverage from TheVerge). For now, I'll stick with today's announcement from Google:

New Nexus 7 tablet: Thinner and lighter. Back-facing camera. 1080p screen. Dual-band WiFi. 4G LTE (single model, works with AT&T, T-Mobile, *and* Verizon). Also, the MicroUSB port supports SlimPort, which seems kinda cool. $229 for the basic model with 16GB of RAM. $349 for the loaded model with 32GB of RAM and the LTE radio.

The LTE specs are actually quite impressive (details at Google's page):
North America:
4G LTE: 700/750/850/1700/1900/2100 MHZ (Bands: 1/2/4/5/13/17)
HSPA+: 850/900/1900/2100/AWS MHz (Bands: 1/2/4/5/8/10)
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Europe:
4G LTE: 800/850/1700/1800/1900/2100/2600 MHz (Bands: 1/2/3/4/5/7/20)
HSPA+: 850/900/1900/2100/AWS MHz (Bands: 1/2/4/5/8/10)
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Android 4.3: Evolutionary changes from Android 4.2, nothing heart-stoppingly awesome. There is clearly a bunch of new support for games, both in Android and in the Google Play store.


Chromecasting: Chrome is now bloated up with cross-platform remote display support. They already have this today with the Android YouTube app (where I can forward a video from my Android phone app to my GoogleTV). I'm guessing this is an admission that GoogleTV penetration has been poor and they're trying to do something cheap and ubiquitous for everybody else. For $35, they may be onto something. There's also a "Google Cast SDK". If somebody could hack up a way to send video from a TiVo to one of these gadgets, that would be a great thing.



Notably absent: any discussion of the "Moto X" that we've all been waiting for. Presumably, it's just a GSM variant of what we've already seen for the Verizon Moto Droid phones.

Notably bothersome: is Google killing GoogleTV in favor of this dongle? The dongle is supported by things like Pandora and Netflix, so perhaps the dongle is secretly a GoogleTV which will install apps, on demand, based on whatever kind of content you push at it. We'll know for sure once that SDK comes out.