I keep coming back to something small from Tuesday's Google event, and it's not the phone.
Yeah, Google finally has its own hardware line now instead of the weird Nexus-partner arrangement it's had going since 2010. The Pixel and Pixel XL are $649 and $769, they run stock Android with none of that Nexus branding anymore, and Google Assistant is baked in so it actually talks back to you instead of just doing search-box stuff. Fine. Good phones, probably, I haven't held one yet. What I can't stop thinking about is Google Home, the $129 speaker that showed up on the same stage, because I already own an Echo Dot and living with it for four months has changed how I feel about the whole category.
I bought the Dot back in June for $49, mostly as a kitchen timer with delusions of grandeur. It's fine at that. It's less fine at almost everything else. Ask it to add something to a shopping list and half the time it hears "cat food" as "cat foot" and just sits there confused, which, same. The bigger thing though is that its little blue ring lights up randomly sometimes, when nobody said the wake word, and there's no real way to know whats triggering it besides some ambient noise that sounded close enough. Amazon says it's not listening or recording until it hears "Alexa," and I believe that's the design intent. But intent and what actually happens on a $49 piece of consumer electronics sitting six feet from where I make my coffee are two different confidence levels for me.
So now theres a second company with a stated goal of putting a permanently-on microphone in as many houses as possible, and its Google, a company whose entire original business model is turning what you do into ad targeting. Home does more than the Dot on paper, it can control your Chromecast, it's got actual stereo speakers instead of a tin-can mono one, and the Assistant behind it is supposedly smarter about follow-up questions than Alexa is. Sundar Pichai stood up there Tuesday and talked about a shift from mobile-first to AI-first, which is the kind of sentence that sounds fine in a keynote and slightly ominous written down later.
None of this means I think it's a bad product. I think it's probably a good one and I'll likely end up with one eventually, because thats how this always goes with me and gadgets. But I noticed nobody in any of the writeups I've read this week spent more than a sentence on the privacy angle before moving on to how good the far-field mic pickup is compared to the Echo. Maybe that's because there isn't much new to say, Amazon already normalized the idea two years ago and everyone made their peace with it or didn't. I made mine, apparently, since I bought the thing.
A few smaller notes from the same event, because there was a lot packed into that one morning. The new Chromecast Ultra does 4K and HDR for $69, which matters basically not at all to me since I don't own a 4K TV, but its nice that its there. Daydream View, the VR headset made of actual fabric instead of plastic, is $79 and ships next month. And Google Wifi, their mesh router system, is going after the Eero and Luma crowd at $129 for a single unit or $299 for three, which is the one thing from the whole event I'm actually tempted by, since the router in my closet right now is a hand-me-down from 2013 that drops the connection in the back bedroom like clockwork every evening around 9pm.
Point being: I went into Tuesday expecting to write about a phone and came out of it thinking about a speaker I don't even own yet, worrying about a thing that already sits in my kitchen. Funny how that works.