Lots of news from Google yesterday. Among the product announcements are a pair of new phones, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, and an AirPods-like set of wireless earbuds, the PixelBuds.
A few thoughts:
Take a few moments to read this first look at the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL by The Verge’s Dieter Bohn. This is a nice little guided tour with lots of pictures.
Now take a moment to read this post from Nick Heer (it’s short), taking the Verge review to task, just a bit. A taste:
That’s the sole mention of the headphone port in Bohn’s preview. That’s weird, because less than a year ago, Bohn agreed with Nilay Patel’s sentiment that removing the headphone port was “user-hostile”. Even two months ago, Bohn was “going to continue to be a curmudgeon about” the removal of 3.5mm headphone port on today’s smartphones.
It is interesting how much grief was sent Apple’s way over the removal of the headphone port. This was Apple skating to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.
No matter. Moving on.
To me, the more interesting announcement yesterday was that of the PixelBuds. Here’s a backgrounder from Mark Gurman.
Forget the wire connecting the two buds, forget the look, forget the sound. Instead, focus on the killer feature:
The headset’s most show-worthy feature is a live translate mode, which lets users hand their phone off to someone speaking another language and that speech will automatically convert to the wearer’s native tongue and be played back by the Pixel Buds.
Google has made a real chess move here. Apple has a choice to make. Will they pull resources off other projects to build a similar feature for iOS and the AirPods? If not, this is a terrific marketing discriminator for Google, a feature of their ecosystem that you can only get if you move to Android.
The ecosystem walls are getting taller, the feature sets richer, and the engineering demands becoming that much more intense. One significant distinction I think will become more important over time: Apple is developing a large (getting larger) lead in hardware, especially when it comes to chip design.
As natural language processing, image detection, augmented reality, and machine intelligence play larger roles in this space, Apple’s investments in bringing chip design expertise in house will start to pay dividends. The iPhone X and Face ID are just the very beginning.