Video livestream thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wURy8AdsS4Summary & thoughts:
- Pixel 3 / 3XL ($799 for 5.5" no-notch, $899 for 6.3" with notch; shipping October 18, those with 64GB, +$100 for 128GB) -- glass back with a "silky texture", corner-to-corner OLED screens, front-firing speakers, "Pixel Visual Core" hardware for image processing, "Top Shot" captures a pile of photos when you click, suggests the best; "Super Res" combines a bunch of photos to increase resolution when shooting with a zoom; "Night Sight" uses machine learning to guess at colors in low-light images (!); front-facing wide-angle "group selfie cam" in addition to a regular front-facing camera; more cheesy AR insertion into images; Google Lens does image recognition
on-device. Oh, and Qi wireless charging is back! Also when on the charging stand ($79) it turns into a Home Hub (below).
- Pixel Slate ($599 tablet + $199 detachable keyboard) -- a Chromebook with a high-res screen (12.3", 293 ppi (2k x 3k?), "vibrant colors" LCD). 8MP cameras front and back. Fingerprint sensor integrated into the power button. The keyboard works a lot like the original Microsoft Surface. "Pixelbook Pen" ($99): mentioned but not shown. The tablet is 7mm thin and weighs 1.6 pounds, which is impressive. They're clearly trying to go after the iPad Pro. Notably missing: CPU specs, RAM specs, etc.
- Home Hub ($149) -- everybody wants to sell you a screen + smart speaker, so why not Google? Seems clever when integrated with Google Assistant. "What's today's weather?" and it shows up rather than just talking at you. Notable: there's no camera, which means you might not freak out about putting it in your bedroom. Several features are aimed at kitchen use, including letting you set multiple timers, or having step-by-step paging for recipes.
Perhaps most interesting, Google is trying to unify control over home IoT devices ("Home View"). Presumably, all your third-party IoT gadgets need to play nice with Google's IoT APIs. They're also doing clever integration where they can, so video from the Nest doorbell can show up on the Home Hub when somebody rings the doorbell. There's going to be a lot of nightmarish backend engineering to make all this come together for third-party services. Example: I'd like this to work with my Amazon-owned Ring video doorbell. Will I be forced to switch to Nest if I want this functionality?
- "Titan Security": We'll be hearing more about this as time marches on. Custom hardware in the Pixel 3 / Pixel Slate that do... something... security... something. Wildly inadequate details here.
Notably absent:
- Any new Nest products, any new WiFi router products, any smartwatches, any Chromecast or Android TV devices
Other thoughts:
- Much bundling. Home Hub and Pixel 3 come with a YouTube Music trial. Pixel Slate comes with a YouTube TV trial.
- Lots of mentions of YouTube Music. Zero mentions of Play Music. I guess Play Music is toast. Dunno what happens to all the MP3s I uploaded to Play Music back in the day. I've got content in there that isn't available from streaming sites. Hmm.