Bits Blog: Updating Android, Google Announces New Nexus Phone

Pogue's Posts Blog: A New and Improved Nexus 7

Bits: Google Debuts an Updated Nexus 7 Tablet

Bits Blog: One on One: Google Android Director on Nexus Strategy

John Lagerling, director of business development for Android.

Google on Monday introduced new Android devices in small, medium and large: a phone, the Nexus 4; an upgraded seven-inch tablet, the Nexus 7; and a 10-inch tablet, the Nexus 10. That puts Google in even more direct competition with Apple, which offers a similar family of three: the iPhone, the iPad Mini and the iPad.

In an interview, John Lagerling, director of business development for Android, talked about the company’s strategy with the Nexus brand, one that revolves around lower prices. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

What do you think are the highlights of the new Nexus devices?

My personal favorites are the 360-degree panoramic photo, Photo Sphere, and the fact that you can do inductive charging so you don’t need to fiddle with a plug — you can just put it on a surface to charge. On a Nexus 10 it’s the fact that it’s so thin and light, and the resolution is 2.5 K, so it has very crisp text and pictures.

And the price. I negotiated the prices and I’m very pleased with being able to deliver these things at these prices; $299 for an unlocked Nexus 4 — I think that’s pretty revolutionary.

How did you get the prices lower?

Basically we felt that we wanted to prove you don’t have to charge $600 to deliver a phone that has the latest-generation technologies. Simply that level of margin is sometimes even unreasonable, and we believed that we could do this. For Nexus 7, we were able to ramp those new memory SKUs at the same price. These move so fast that we knew after a few months, from an economical perspective, it was doable. Between us and our partners we have a very good understanding of supply chains. We’ve all done the best we can to really reach these prices — $399, $299 is pretty amazing, if I may say so.

I noticed each Nexus device is made by a different manufacturer. Is this to keep the playing field fair for Android partners?

It’s not so much fairness as it is to sort of work with partners who happen to be in good “phase match” with us in what we’re trying to do. So Samsung just happens to be in a good phase match on a high-end display, which is exactly what we wanted to do at a low cost. LG had a good phase match with the hardware they were working on. Asus as well. It’s just more about the timing being right.

From top: the Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10.

We’ve always done that with our lead devices. Even before the Nexus One we did the lead device with HTC. We did the Xoom, which was a lead device with Motorola. And now we’ve sort of streamlined what the Nexus program is. We did really well with the Nexus 7, I feel, because nobody really pushed the envelope with seven-inch in terms of price and performance. It really proved that category. We felt the 10-inch category was overpriced and underpowered, and we wanted to see what we could do for that from our perspective.

Where does Motorola stand in all this? You haven’t used them yet for the Nexus program.

They stand where Sharp would stand, or Sony would stand or Huawei would stand. From my perspective as a partnership director, they are another partner. We are really walled between the Motorola team and the Android team. They would bid on doing a Nexus device just like any other company.

So how does Google take advantage of the Motorola acquisition?

The way I understand it is, it’s mostly about the patents, the way you can sort of disarm this huge attack against Android. We talked about prices. There are players in the industry who were unhappy about more competitive pricing for the consumers. They want to keep the prices high, they want to force the price to be so high that operators have to subsidize the devices very highly. That’s not only the Cupertino guys but also for the guys up in Seattle. They want higher margins, they want to charge more for software.

We simply believe there’s a better way of doing it without extracting that much payment from end users, because there are other ways to drive revenues. Patents were used as a weapon to try to stop that evolution and scare people away from lower-cost alternatives. And I think with the Motorola acquisition we’ve shown we’re able to put skin in the game and push back.

With Nexus phones, the lack of carrier support is the big roadblock. Only having the marketing and retail support of one carrier — T-Mobile, in the case of the Nexus 4 — isn’t as good as having the Big Four. In the past you’ve sold Nexus phones through the Google online store, and it was a failure.

Nexus One was very early. People didn’t know what Nexus was or what Android phones were. I feel we’re in a very different environment now and I feel the Nexus 7 has set the stage for the Nexus program at a new level, so we feel the time is right.

Approaching one million sales a month for the Nexus 7, right? According to Asus.

We haven’t announced numbers. We typically don’t allow our partners to announce numbers. All I can say is it has sold way above expectations. That could mean one of two things: Either we have very low expectations or we’ve done amazing well. But we’re very pleased with how we’ve done with the Nexus 7.

Most of the apps in the Google Play store are for phones, not for tablets. How many are there for tablets?

I don’t have a number for how many apps are properly adding those APIs that you need to put fully to use the extra screen real estate. What I can say is that the Nexus 7 has been a superstrong catalyst to kick off developers’ attention to making those expansions, so we’ve seen tremendous growth in apps for the larger screen size. The trending is very positive because of the Nexus 7.

But before, I’ll be honest and say, yes, there was a lack of tablet apps that supported bigger screen real estate. But I’ll add that, I know we talked about the Cupertino guys, but obviously people who have smartphones are a huge target for us. If you look globally that’s something we worry more about, not so much about competing with other smartphones, but more about, how can we get more people onto the Internet on mobile phones? And that’s a big deal. That’s why low cost is so important.

Android software has gotten to the point where it’s more respectable. There used to be these two very polarized camps, where a lot of people would say iOS was the greatest and Android was ugly. But the lines are blurring as Android has gotten polished. What happened?

We had such a long laundry list of things we wanted to do, and the fact we had to roll it out so it would work on a multitude of devices, it simply took a bit more time for us to get here. But the structure we’ve had for an operating system from day one including widgets, actual multitasking, notifications, it’s finally coming to its true form right as the software has come into final polish. Project Butter for Jelly Bean, to get every pixel to move really beautifully, it’s finally showing off those capabilities we’ve always planned to have. We have the right teams and maturity to deliver what we’ve always wanted to do. I’ll admit we’re finally much more closer to our actual vision in the past year than we have ever been.

Google Goes Back to the Drawing Board for Nexus Q

But last week, just five weeks after the introductory pomp at the annual developers’ conference, Google indefinitely postponed shipment of the device.

Though Google was hardly betting the company on the Q, the failure reveals deeper challenges for the Internet search giant as it tries to move into two new areas: hardware and social technology. Though the hardware for the Q, which Google built in a factory in San Jose, Calif., has for the most part been well received, early users say the device simply does not do enough. And for what it does, at $299, it is too expensive.

The company’s only statement on the delay came in a letter to customers who had ordered it. The letter acknowledged the criticism of early users and said, “we have decided to postpone the consumer launch of Nexus Q while we work on making it even better.” Customers who ordered the device already will receive it at no charge.

Google’s push to build the Q is part of the epic battle between Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.com for control of the living room — the TV shows and movies we watch, the music we listen to and the advertisements we see while sitting on the sofa.

“The battle for the TV is raging,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst on media and technology at Forrester. “If you’re Google and you know the future of advertising is going to encompass all the screens — the ones you’re strong on, the PC and mobile phone, but also TV — then you’ve got to nail that piece or you run the risk of hitting a ceiling with your revenue potential.”

Advertisers are expected to spend $64.8 billion on TV this year, compared with $39.5 billion online, according to eMarketer, the advertising research firm. People are spending less time reading print publications or listening to the radio in favor of digital devices, eMarketer said, and they are spending more time watching old-fashioned TV.

The delay of the Q is not Google’s first misstep as it tries to become a consumer electronics company and make its products jump off computers and phones and into the family room. Google’s Internet-connected TV, Google TV, has struggled to sign on programming partners and rumbled with hardware makers, and has not caught on widely with TV viewers. Like the Q, it was delayed in its early days to improve the software, though Consumer Reports called LG’s latest Google TV the best version of the product yet.

The Q plugs into TVs or speakers so its owners can listen to music or play video from their Android phones or tablets. It is similar to devices like Apple TV, Boxee, Roku and Google TV.

But the Q is much more expensive than those products and does much less. It plays music, movies and TV shows only from Google Play’s limited collection and YouTube, and can be controlled only by Android devices. It is unclear how it would work with Google TV. The Nexus 7, however, a $199 tablet computer that Google introduced on the same day, has been met with rave reviews and is selling quickly, and can be used as a remote control for TVs.

Tech companies want people to buy their devices so they will also buy their media, and vice versa. Amazon.com sells Kindles so people will buy e-books from Amazon, and Apple sells music on iTunes so people will buy iPods. Companies are racing with one another, because once people store enough media with one service, it is much harder to persuade them to switch services or devices.

Though analysts say the race is far from the finish line, a problem for Google is that most people have not purchased much in the way of music and movies from Google.

“They only extended it to people who had music inside Google Music and media purchased off Google Play which, let’s admit, was a much smaller market than Apple iTunes, Amazon and any other media outlet,” said Chris Silva, a mobile analyst at the Altimeter Group. “They want to get people using Android and using Google Play for media and they know it’s an uphill battle, which is why they’re pushing it so hard.”

Google also hoped that the Q would be the centerpiece of its fledgling efforts to connect home devices to the Internet. It has said it wants to tackle not just the entertainment space but the whole home, eventually connecting coffee pots to the Internet so they can be turned off remotely, for instance, or refrigerators so they can order milk when it is running low.

State of the Art: Nexus 7, Google’s New Tablet, Seriously Challenges the iPad - State of the Art

Steve Jobs hated the mimicry. Google’s Android software “ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

But there’s a positive aspect to the imitation, too. You could argue that Apple’s copycats fill in markets where Apple dares not tread, or offer an alternative to Apple’s very pure, controlled, choice-constrained world.

In that worldview, Google’s 2012 new-product announcements must seem like a cornucopia of good news. First, Google opened a unified online store with separate tabs for apps, e-books, TV shows, movies and music, modeled on the iTunes store.

Last week, it introduced the Nexus Q, a black sphere that connects to your TV and plays those songs and videos, pretty much the way the black square Apple TV does. (You can read my review of the Q online at nytimes.com/personaltech.)

Above all, Google has just introduced the Nexus 7, a shiny black tablet that aims to challenge both the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. (Nexus phone, Nexus tablet, Nexus sphere thing; what is Google thinking, anyway? If it truly wants to emulate Apple, it should minimize confusion, not foster it.)

The Kindle Fire’s most important feature is its price: $200. That’s an eye-popper in a world where the dominant tablet, the iPad, costs $500 and up. Of course, the Fire isn’t the same thing as the iPad. Its seven-inch screen is much smaller. It’s thicker and blockier. It doesn’t have a camera, microphone, GPS function, Bluetooth or memory-card slot. Its primary function is playing material you buy from Amazon, like books and video.

But that’s why Google’s tablet, manufactured by Asus, is a ground-shaking arrival. It, too, has a seven-inch screen and costs only $200, but this time, you don’t get any sense that its creators skimped to keep the price down. It’s sleek and beautiful, with rounded edges, unlike the sawed-off rectangular back of the Fire, and a “pleather” back panel that feels great. And it weighs 2.6 ounces less than the Fire, which makes a world of difference. It’s slightly thinner, too, although thicker than the iPad.

More important, the Nexus is a full-blown tablet. It’s almost as capable of letting you create stuff as consuming it. It’s fast, smooth and capable of running any Android tablet app.

So yes, the Google tablet pretty much blows the Kindle Fire’s value proposition into a cloud of ash. But it also undercuts its own Android-tablet competitors. For example, Samsung’s similar seven-inch Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2, costs $250 for the same eight gigabytes of memory.

How is Google able to offer a deluxe tablet for the same price as Amazon’s bare-bones one? I asked the Nexus tablet team if it was playing a game of razors-and-blades here, losing money on every tablet with the intention of making money by selling books, movies, music and TV shows. Google concedes it makes no profit when it sells this tablet from its Web site — and therefore it must lose money on each one it sells in a store.

In any case, the Nexus 7 is well-equipped — for a $200 tablet. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a nine-hour battery, a bright and very sharp screen, a loud mono speaker and GPS function. A seven-inch Android tablet makes a sensational GPS navigator.

The hardware is missing only a few tidbits. There’s a camera on the front for video calls, but no camera on the back. The battery isn’t removable. There’s no cellular option; you can connect to the Internet only over Wi-Fi. And since there’s no memory-card slot, the built-in eight gigabytes of storage is all you’ll ever have. (You can get a 16-gigabyte model for $50 more.)

What the Nexus 7 has that no other tablet has at the moment, however, is the latest version of Android 4.1, named Jelly Bean. Part of life in Androidland is never knowing whether or not an Android software update will be available for your brand and model.

Jelly Bean offers dozens of new features. For example, swiping your finger up the screen produces the Google Now screen: little “cards” bearing information it thinks you could use right now, based on your location, location history, calendar and Google searches. If you’ve recently searched for a sports team or a flight, for example, you see the latest scores or flight status. Weather, traffic and appointments are also part of this intriguing but only partly baked feature.

You can now save a city’s worth of Google Maps onto your tablet, so that you won’t need an Internet connection to navigate. That’s handy when you travel overseas.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 7, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about the Google Nexus 7 tablet, misstated the music downloading practices of the Google music store. While a song or an album can be downloaded from a personal collection to the Google Nexus 7 only twice using a Web browser, the user can make unlimited downloads using Google’s Music Manager program; it is not the case that Google’s music store allows only two downloads of a song.

State of the Art: Nexus 7, Google’s New Tablet, Seriously Challenges the iPad - State of the Art

Steve Jobs hated the mimicry. Google’s Android software “ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

But there’s a positive aspect to the imitation, too. You could argue that Apple’s copycats fill in markets where Apple dares not tread, or offer an alternative to Apple’s very pure, controlled, choice-constrained world.

In that worldview, Google’s 2012 new-product announcements must seem like a cornucopia of good news. First, Google opened a unified online store with separate tabs for apps, e-books, TV shows, movies and music, modeled on the iTunes store.

Last week, it introduced the Nexus Q, a black sphere that connects to your TV and plays those songs and videos, pretty much the way the black square Apple TV does. (You can read my review of the Q online at nytimes.com/personaltech.)

Above all, Google has just introduced the Nexus 7, a shiny black tablet that aims to challenge both the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. (Nexus phone, Nexus tablet, Nexus sphere thing; what is Google thinking, anyway? If it truly wants to emulate Apple, it should minimize confusion, not foster it.)

The Kindle Fire’s most important feature is its price: $200. That’s an eye-popper in a world where the dominant tablet, the iPad, costs $500 and up. Of course, the Fire isn’t the same thing as the iPad. Its seven-inch screen is much smaller. It’s thicker and blockier. It doesn’t have a camera, microphone, GPS function, Bluetooth or memory-card slot. Its primary function is playing material you buy from Amazon, like books and video.

But that’s why Google’s tablet, manufactured by Asus, is a ground-shaking arrival. It, too, has a seven-inch screen and costs only $200, but this time, you don’t get any sense that its creators skimped to keep the price down. It’s sleek and beautiful, with rounded edges, unlike the sawed-off rectangular back of the Fire, and a “pleather” back panel that feels great. And it weighs 2.6 ounces less than the Fire, which makes a world of difference. It’s slightly thinner, too, although thicker than the iPad.

More important, the Nexus is a full-blown tablet. It’s almost as capable of letting you create stuff as consuming it. It’s fast, smooth and capable of running any Android tablet app.

So yes, the Google tablet pretty much blows the Kindle Fire’s value proposition into a cloud of ash. But it also undercuts its own Android-tablet competitors. For example, Samsung’s similar seven-inch Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2, costs $250 for the same eight gigabytes of memory.

How is Google able to offer a deluxe tablet for the same price as Amazon’s bare-bones one? I asked the Nexus tablet team if it was playing a game of razors-and-blades here, losing money on every tablet with the intention of making money by selling books, movies, music and TV shows. Google concedes it makes no profit when it sells this tablet from its Web site — and therefore it must lose money on each one it sells in a store.

In any case, the Nexus 7 is well-equipped — for a $200 tablet. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a nine-hour battery, a bright and very sharp screen, a loud mono speaker and GPS function. A seven-inch Android tablet makes a sensational GPS navigator.

The hardware is missing only a few tidbits. There’s a camera on the front for video calls, but no camera on the back. The battery isn’t removable. There’s no cellular option; you can connect to the Internet only over Wi-Fi. And since there’s no memory-card slot, the built-in eight gigabytes of storage is all you’ll ever have. (You can get a 16-gigabyte model for $50 more.)

What the Nexus 7 has that no other tablet has at the moment, however, is the latest version of Android 4.1, named Jelly Bean. Part of life in Androidland is never knowing whether or not an Android software update will be available for your brand and model.

Jelly Bean offers dozens of new features. For example, swiping your finger up the screen produces the Google Now screen: little “cards” bearing information it thinks you could use right now, based on your location, location history, calendar and Google searches. If you’ve recently searched for a sports team or a flight, for example, you see the latest scores or flight status. Weather, traffic and appointments are also part of this intriguing but only partly baked feature.

You can now save a city’s worth of Google Maps onto your tablet, so that you won’t need an Internet connection to navigate. That’s handy when you travel overseas.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 7, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about the Google Nexus 7 tablet, misstated the music downloading practices of the Google music store. While a song or an album can be downloaded from a personal collection to the Google Nexus 7 only twice using a Web browser, the user can make unlimited downloads using Google’s Music Manager program; it is not the case that Google’s music store allows only two downloads of a song.

State of the Art: Nexus 7, Google’s New Tablet, Seriously Challenges the iPad - State of the Art

Steve Jobs hated the mimicry. Google’s Android software “ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

But there’s a positive aspect to the imitation, too. You could argue that Apple’s copycats fill in markets where Apple dares not tread, or offer an alternative to Apple’s very pure, controlled, choice-constrained world.

In that worldview, Google’s 2012 new-product announcements must seem like a cornucopia of good news. First, Google opened a unified online store with separate tabs for apps, e-books, TV shows, movies and music, modeled on the iTunes store.

Last week, it introduced the Nexus Q, a black sphere that connects to your TV and plays those songs and videos, pretty much the way the black square Apple TV does. (You can read my review of the Q online at nytimes.com/personaltech.)

Above all, Google has just introduced the Nexus 7, a shiny black tablet that aims to challenge both the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. (Nexus phone, Nexus tablet, Nexus sphere thing; what is Google thinking, anyway? If it truly wants to emulate Apple, it should minimize confusion, not foster it.)

The Kindle Fire’s most important feature is its price: $200. That’s an eye-popper in a world where the dominant tablet, the iPad, costs $500 and up. Of course, the Fire isn’t the same thing as the iPad. Its seven-inch screen is much smaller. It’s thicker and blockier. It doesn’t have a camera, microphone, GPS function, Bluetooth or memory-card slot. Its primary function is playing material you buy from Amazon, like books and video.

But that’s why Google’s tablet, manufactured by Asus, is a ground-shaking arrival. It, too, has a seven-inch screen and costs only $200, but this time, you don’t get any sense that its creators skimped to keep the price down. It’s sleek and beautiful, with rounded edges, unlike the sawed-off rectangular back of the Fire, and a “pleather” back panel that feels great. And it weighs 2.6 ounces less than the Fire, which makes a world of difference. It’s slightly thinner, too, although thicker than the iPad.

More important, the Nexus is a full-blown tablet. It’s almost as capable of letting you create stuff as consuming it. It’s fast, smooth and capable of running any Android tablet app.

So yes, the Google tablet pretty much blows the Kindle Fire’s value proposition into a cloud of ash. But it also undercuts its own Android-tablet competitors. For example, Samsung’s similar seven-inch Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2, costs $250 for the same eight gigabytes of memory.

How is Google able to offer a deluxe tablet for the same price as Amazon’s bare-bones one? I asked the Nexus tablet team if it was playing a game of razors-and-blades here, losing money on every tablet with the intention of making money by selling books, movies, music and TV shows. Google concedes it makes no profit when it sells this tablet from its Web site — and therefore it must lose money on each one it sells in a store.

In any case, the Nexus 7 is well-equipped — for a $200 tablet. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a nine-hour battery, a bright and very sharp screen, a loud mono speaker and GPS function. A seven-inch Android tablet makes a sensational GPS navigator.

The hardware is missing only a few tidbits. There’s a camera on the front for video calls, but no camera on the back. The battery isn’t removable. There’s no cellular option; you can connect to the Internet only over Wi-Fi. And since there’s no memory-card slot, the built-in eight gigabytes of storage is all you’ll ever have. (You can get a 16-gigabyte model for $50 more.)

What the Nexus 7 has that no other tablet has at the moment, however, is the latest version of Android 4.1, named Jelly Bean. Part of life in Androidland is never knowing whether or not an Android software update will be available for your brand and model.

Jelly Bean offers dozens of new features. For example, swiping your finger up the screen produces the Google Now screen: little “cards” bearing information it thinks you could use right now, based on your location, location history, calendar and Google searches. If you’ve recently searched for a sports team or a flight, for example, you see the latest scores or flight status. Weather, traffic and appointments are also part of this intriguing but only partly baked feature.

You can now save a city’s worth of Google Maps onto your tablet, so that you won’t need an Internet connection to navigate. That’s handy when you travel overseas.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 7, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about the Google Nexus 7 tablet, misstated the music downloading practices of the Google music store. While a song or an album can be downloaded from a personal collection to the Google Nexus 7 only twice using a Web browser, the user can make unlimited downloads using Google’s Music Manager program; it is not the case that Google’s music store allows only two downloads of a song.