 We're here at Google's campus in Mountain View to talk to the team behind the Nexus line of products. We're going to take a look at what goes into making these products and where the company goes from here. It's actually going to be a very exciting year for us because instead of having a single Nexus device, we actually have a family of Nexus devices. We worked with Suess leading up to the summer to launch Nexus 7. Now we're going to show you a device that we partnered with LG on and a device that we partnered with Samsung on. This is Nexus 4, which is our new flagship Nexus phone. That's the official name. That is the official name. So the leaks have been right. Why am I even here? I don't know. Why are you here? I'm here for you. Obviously Android being really a platform but also an ecosystem, it's all about partnerships. That's how Google really gets our innovations out to users is through partners. My name is Patrick Brady and I run our Android partner engineering team. I'm actually super excited this Christmas because it's like finally we have a Nexus portfolio that is worthy of the Nexus name. Do you feel that previous devices were not up to your standards in terms of build quality? I think the previous devices, the technology wasn't there and we weren't able to push ourselves hard enough. But this year the partners that we chose really brought amazing technology to the table and they were willing to go the last mile, the ultimate mile, the extra mile. When we build the Nexus devices, we really do form one team. So we have the Android engineering team building the next release of the Android platform and at the same time we have our hardware partners on site actually downstairs in this building working together making sure that we're building the best possible hardware for our next Nexus devices and we have the best possible software experience on top of it. What we're doing in 4.2 is we're actually bringing the widget framework from the home screen to the lock screen so that you can do things before you actually unlock your phone. If I scroll to the right from the edge of the screen here I can go to my camera. If I scroll to the left, I have all my widgets here, I've got my inbox, I've got my sound search widget here so if I hear a song in a bar and I immediately want to know what it is, I don't have to unlock the device, I'm going to add widget here and let's say I'm going to put on calendar on my lock screen. And obviously from any of these lock screens if you want to get through you can just swipe up, bring up the actual unlock UI and then get in. One important new thing here on the notification sheet is this icon on the top right that gets you into quick settings so the screen just flips and gives you access to things that you need often like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth configuration and if you really want to get into it very, very quickly instead of swiping down on the notification sheet and pressing that icon you can just swipe down with two fingers. Google Now was one of the hero features of Jelly Bean back in June when we announced it. What we're doing is we're continuing as we said, continuing to add new Google Now cards with new and more interesting things. So what Google Now is doing right now is when you receive an email that contains a delivery details with a tracking number, it takes a tracking number for you and puts it on a card that basically says, is package just shipped? If you want to track it just tap here and that will take you directly to the website of whichever courier is being used. So what we're doing in this new version of Google Now, if you've received a confirmation email for your flight, Google Now can pick up that information about the flight, save it and then when the right time comes and the right time is the day of your flight, it then shows you this card. Similarly if you get a hotel confirmation email, Google Now will pick up those details for you and display them on the day of that reservation so you've got the reservation details in hand. So Nexus 4, it's got Gorilla Glass 2 front and back. It's got 2D glass on the front so it's got a little curve to it. The device is really just all about the glass. Are you worried about these things breaking? Because you know glass has a tendency to break. So one of the things that we've done with this product is we've paid a lot of attention to how you hold it and how the center frame protects it. So the center frame actually protects the glass when it's resting down here. It also comes up to the edge of the glass and surrounds it on the back side and it's carefully curved up there. Even though it looks like it's got a little chamfer on there, that chamfer edge is really nicely rounded so it fits really nicely in your hand. The previous Nexus phones we curved the glass to fit the way that you talked on the phone but this device is really much more focused about how you interact with the phone. So the curve happens on the edges and that means that it's really well suited for all the types of interactions that you do with an Android device. All the swipe gestures, especially the swipes that come from the edges, just kind of naturally glide. In 4.2 we're adding another method of typing which we call gesture typing. So this is kind of like swipe. Whether it's like swipe or not I think is less interesting because we've actually spent a significant amount of time thinking about how this thing should work. We do real time gesture recognition so the recognizer is running at all times. It's collecting every single data point from your fingers gliding on the keyboard and then recalculating and recalculating and recalculating. So what we do is we put what you think you're typing on this little square that shows up where your finger is. So at all points in time you're looking where your finger is going and you're seeing what it's telling you. So it's pretty unique. So Nexus 4 has an 8 megapixel rear facing sensor, Sony BSI sensor and we'll be supporting HDR and we have some cool new panorama modes that I think you guys will like. So here's a camera in Android 4.2. We took everything out of the shot. All these knobs and controls and things that we used to have, they're all gone. So I can swipe back into it. There's the shot. Fantastic. That is great. I can apply some filters to it right here. So I think you're going to look great in bleach. This is our album cover. Other things and it's right there so that's done. That saves a duplicate, right? There will be the original and the... The original will still be there. Now the other thing that we did was we have these accelerator gestures in camera now. So if I want to, for example, change my flash setting, I can just hold and then swipe to turn it on. In this case I just want to turn it off. That will locate anywhere, if your thumb is up high or down low, it will just find where your thumb is. Yeah, so I can do it down here. I can do it up here. Since ICS, for about a year, since Ice Cream Sanctuary, we've had panorama mode. But we've wanted to do a lot more than that because we think panorama still doesn't capture the entire scene. So we're borrowing from some of the technology that we built for Street View to build a completely new approach to taking these immersive photos and that's called Photosphere. What is full resolution here? It depends on how many images you've captured into your Photosphere. But it could be tens of megapixels. Can we see those people over on the left? I mean that's pretty cool. That's pretty crazy. I mean that's pretty crazy. And also terrifying. I'm worried about that man. We look for the partners that we really see innovating in specific areas. And so we really liked what LG was doing with a couple different technologies, specifically around inductive charging, some of their display technologies, and just some of the devices we saw them bringing out looked like great hardware platforms for us to really showcase the next version of Android. And this is our newest dock. Our wireless dock. WebOS fan over here losing it. This is still a pre-production sample. Actually all the devices I'm showing you are not the actual final final hardware because that's how we roll around here. But this is our inductive charging dock. There's an inductive coil on the device and it works just like a charger. Some of the devices our partners come and pitch to us they want to work with us on Nexus devices and we have lots of partners coming to us and proposing new designs. We typically look at that and we have an idea on the hardware side. We have things we like, we have things we don't like about it, and we work with them to refine that. On Nexus 7 we really worked with Asus to change kind of the grip and the radius of all the curves in the bezel so that it had a great feel in your hand. We did a similar kind of process back and forth with LG on the Nexus 4 as well as with Samsung on the Nexus 10. What is this? This is Nexus 10. Which is a 10 inch super high resolution tablet. It's 8.9 millimeters, 603 grams and curved to fit your hands. The Nexus 10 has a 2560 by 1600 screen. Early on we said we have to have this screen, it's gorgeous. We needed a chip that could power that and the only one we found out there was the Exynos 5, 5250 from Samsung. With Nexus 10 we set out to figure out, okay, well how do we get something that is just as comfortable as Nexus 7 was but in this large size. That's why we focused on the details of how the product fits and feels in your hand. It has kind of this camera body gun metal finish on it. This isn't a metalized back that's going to just slip out of your hand. This is something that you can really easily, comfortably hold one handed at kind of an incredible angle because the back really grips your hand. This is actually kind of a nice finish, it's weird. So you're saying this is plastic, this is just a single piece of plastic. It's a single piece. Yeah, but you're kind of touting that, which is, usually people are like, we made it look less like plastic. But this is a beautiful piece of plastic that is essential to making this device so light. You know a 300 pixel per inch screen, you know in the abstract it's just a metric on sort of a tech specs sheet. But when you bring your Google Play content together with it, what it means is I can open up the magazines reader and get a beautiful high def magazine experience with beautiful pictures, you know very crisp clear text, all that sort of stuff really kind of bringing together how play content works in conjunction with the hardware and the software. One of the amazing things about this screen is its resolution, it's basically print. The other way that we sort of have been trying to evolve Google Play is thinking about discovery. Within the store now there's a new feature we call the music explorer that allows you to look at similar artists of the genre across the store to get some different ideas of bands maybe that you hadn't heard about that you would like to know about. When I was a kid, my father had this console radio in our living room, it was this gigantic piece of furniture and it had this huge knob that you could spin and it would sort of whip across a dozen radio stations at once. And so we thought like how could we bring that sort of more of an analog discovery experience to the tablet. You don't want to make a big like analog looking knob that you could flip through. Were there early designs that were like a big... We're not really about the brushed aluminum so much, but you know I think it's actually kind of an interesting thing to bring an explorer that has a vibe that's pretty close to the Android aesthetic. I mean I think we're actually trying to come up with a certain sort of feel to our UI and one that is really informed by the cloud and not the sort of literalness of a radio sitting on your desk. I feel like you guys have been promising tablet software for a couple of years now. Will you have the software and can it be a more attractive price point than the $500, $600 tablets that are on the market doing essentially the same thing? Well I don't think anybody is doing this. Nobody has a tablet that's this thin, nobody has a tablet that is this light and nobody has a tablet at this resolution. And all that said, it's going to be very competitively priced. What about the apps? One of the reasons why we were happy with Nexus 7 coming out first is because we really wanted to excite the Android ecosystem about the possibility of tablets. Apps that are designed with a tablet in mind for Nexus 7 work great on this. So you can almost think of Nexus 7 as a bit of a bootstrap to the ecosystem. Part of the reason why we've invested significantly in building what you're holding is exactly so that we have more and more motivation in the developer community to do that. We don't go out and pay people to do stuff. We would never do that. That's not how Google Developer Relations works. But we are trying as hard as we can to develop these ecosystem. When there's a significant number or even a trend towards a significant number of tablets like this in the market, people will see it. Android without these Nexus devices would not be possible. And that story of what used to be called lead devices, way back with the T-Mobile G1 with HTC, has evolved into more of a brand for end users, that is Nexus. And that's, I think, incredibly important to Android as a whole and the Android development effort. Ultimately, it is up to the ecosystem. We can only go so far by ourselves.
 We're here at Google's campus in Mountain View to talk to the team behind the Nexus
 line of products.
 We're going to take a look at what goes into making these products and where the company
 goes from here.
 It's actually going to be a very exciting year for us because instead of having a single
 Nexus device, we actually have a family of Nexus devices.
 We worked with Suess leading up to the summer to launch Nexus 7.
 Now we're going to show you a device that we partnered with LG on and a device that
 we partnered with Samsung on.
 This is Nexus 4, which is our new flagship Nexus phone.
 That's the official name.
 That is the official name.
 So the leaks have been right.
 Why am I even here?
 I don't know.
 Why are you here?
 I'm here for you.
 Obviously Android being really a platform but also an ecosystem, it's all about partnerships.
 That's how Google really gets our innovations out to users is through partners.
 My name is Patrick Brady and I run our Android partner engineering team.
 I'm actually super excited this Christmas because it's like finally we have a Nexus
 portfolio that is worthy of the Nexus name.
 Do you feel that previous devices were not up to your standards in terms of build quality?
 I think the previous devices, the technology wasn't there and we weren't able to push
 ourselves hard enough.
 But this year the partners that we chose really brought amazing technology to the table and
 they were willing to go the last mile, the ultimate mile, the extra mile.
 When we build the Nexus devices, we really do form one team.
 So we have the Android engineering team building the next release of the Android platform and
 at the same time we have our hardware partners on site actually downstairs in this building
 working together making sure that we're building the best possible hardware for our next Nexus
 devices and we have the best possible software experience on top of it.
 What we're doing in 4.2 is we're actually bringing the widget framework from the home
 screen to the lock screen so that you can do things before you actually unlock your
 phone.
 If I scroll to the right from the edge of the screen here I can go to my camera.
 If I scroll to the left, I have all my widgets here, I've got my inbox, I've got my sound
 search widget here so if I hear a song in a bar and I immediately want to know what
 it is, I don't have to unlock the device, I'm going to add widget here and let's say
 I'm going to put on calendar on my lock screen.
 And obviously from any of these lock screens if you want to get through you can just swipe
 up, bring up the actual unlock UI and then get in.
 One important new thing here on the notification sheet is this icon on the top right that gets
 you into quick settings so the screen just flips and gives you access to things that
 you need often like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth configuration and if you really want to get into it very,
 very quickly instead of swiping down on the notification sheet and pressing that icon
 you can just swipe down with two fingers.
 Google Now was one of the hero features of Jelly Bean back in June when we announced
 it.
 What we're doing is we're continuing as we said, continuing to add new Google Now cards
 with new and more interesting things.
 So what Google Now is doing right now is when you receive an email that contains a delivery
 details with a tracking number, it takes a tracking number for you and puts it on a card
 that basically says, is package just shipped?
 If you want to track it just tap here and that will take you directly to the website
 of whichever courier is being used.
 So what we're doing in this new version of Google Now, if you've received a confirmation
 email for your flight, Google Now can pick up that information about the flight, save
 it and then when the right time comes and the right time is the day of your flight,
 it then shows you this card.
 Similarly if you get a hotel confirmation email, Google Now will pick up those details
 for you and display them on the day of that reservation so you've got the reservation
 details in hand.
 So Nexus 4, it's got Gorilla Glass 2 front and back.
 It's got 2D glass on the front so it's got a little curve to it.
 The device is really just all about the glass.
 Are you worried about these things breaking?
 Because you know glass has a tendency to break.
 So one of the things that we've done with this product is we've paid a lot of attention
 to how you hold it and how the center frame protects it.
 So the center frame actually protects the glass when it's resting down here.
 It also comes up to the edge of the glass and surrounds it on the back side and it's
 carefully curved up there.
 Even though it looks like it's got a little chamfer on there, that chamfer edge is really
 nicely rounded so it fits really nicely in your hand.
 The previous Nexus phones we curved the glass to fit the way that you talked on the phone
 but this device is really much more focused about how you interact with the phone.
 So the curve happens on the edges and that means that it's really well suited for all
 the types of interactions that you do with an Android device.
 All the swipe gestures, especially the swipes that come from the edges, just kind of naturally
 glide.
 In 4.2 we're adding another method of typing which we call gesture typing.
 So this is kind of like swipe.
 Whether it's like swipe or not I think is less interesting because we've actually spent
 a significant amount of time thinking about how this thing should work.
 We do real time gesture recognition so the recognizer is running at all times.
 It's collecting every single data point from your fingers gliding on the keyboard and then
 recalculating and recalculating and recalculating.
 So what we do is we put what you think you're typing on this little square that shows up
 where your finger is.
 So at all points in time you're looking where your finger is going and you're seeing what
 it's telling you.
 So it's pretty unique.
 So Nexus 4 has an 8 megapixel rear facing sensor, Sony BSI sensor and we'll be supporting
 HDR and we have some cool new panorama modes that I think you guys will like.
 So here's a camera in Android 4.2.
 We took everything out of the shot.
 All these knobs and controls and things that we used to have, they're all gone.
 So I can swipe back into it.
 There's the shot.
 Fantastic.
 That is great.
 I can apply some filters to it right here.
 So I think you're going to look great in bleach.
 This is our album cover.
 Other things and it's right there so that's done.
 That saves a duplicate, right?
 There will be the original and the...
 The original will still be there.
 Now the other thing that we did was we have these accelerator gestures in camera now.
 So if I want to, for example, change my flash setting, I can just hold and then swipe to
 turn it on.
 In this case I just want to turn it off.
 That will locate anywhere, if your thumb is up high or down low, it will just find where
 your thumb is.
 Yeah, so I can do it down here.
 I can do it up here.
 Since ICS, for about a year, since Ice Cream Sanctuary, we've had panorama mode.
 But we've wanted to do a lot more than that because we think panorama still doesn't capture
 the entire scene.
 So we're borrowing from some of the technology that we built for Street View to build a completely
 new approach to taking these immersive photos and that's called Photosphere.
 What is full resolution here?
 It depends on how many images you've captured into your Photosphere.
 But it could be tens of megapixels.
 Can we see those people over on the left?
 I mean that's pretty cool.
 That's pretty crazy.
 I mean that's pretty crazy.
 And also terrifying.
 I'm worried about that man.
 We look for the partners that we really see innovating in specific areas.
 And so we really liked what LG was doing with a couple different technologies, specifically
 around inductive charging, some of their display technologies, and just some of the devices
 we saw them bringing out looked like great hardware platforms for us to really showcase
 the next version of Android.
 And this is our newest dock.
 Our wireless dock.
 WebOS fan over here losing it.
 This is still a pre-production sample.
 Actually all the devices I'm showing you are not the actual final final hardware because
 that's how we roll around here.
 But this is our inductive charging dock.
 There's an inductive coil on the device and it works just like a charger.
 Some of the devices our partners come and pitch to us they want to work with us on Nexus
 devices and we have lots of partners coming to us and proposing new designs.
 We typically look at that and we have an idea on the hardware side.
 We have things we like, we have things we don't like about it, and we work with them
 to refine that.
 On Nexus 7 we really worked with Asus to change kind of the grip and the radius of all the
 curves in the bezel so that it had a great feel in your hand.
 We did a similar kind of process back and forth with LG on the Nexus 4 as well as with
 Samsung on the Nexus 10.
 What is this?
 This is Nexus 10.
 Which is a 10 inch super high resolution tablet.
 It's 8.9 millimeters, 603 grams and curved to fit your hands.
 The Nexus 10 has a 2560 by 1600 screen.
 Early on we said we have to have this screen, it's gorgeous.
 We needed a chip that could power that and the only one we found out there was the Exynos
 5, 5250 from Samsung.
 With Nexus 10 we set out to figure out, okay, well how do we get something that is just
 as comfortable as Nexus 7 was but in this large size.
 That's why we focused on the details of how the product fits and feels in your hand.
 It has kind of this camera body gun metal finish on it.
 This isn't a metalized back that's going to just slip out of your hand.
 This is something that you can really easily, comfortably hold one handed at kind of an
 incredible angle because the back really grips your hand.
 This is actually kind of a nice finish, it's weird.
 So you're saying this is plastic, this is just a single piece of plastic.
 It's a single piece.
 Yeah, but you're kind of touting that, which is, usually people are like, we made it look
 less like plastic.
 But this is a beautiful piece of plastic that is essential to making this device so light.
 You know a 300 pixel per inch screen, you know in the abstract it's just a metric on
 sort of a tech specs sheet.
 But when you bring your Google Play content together with it, what it means is I can open
 up the magazines reader and get a beautiful high def magazine experience with beautiful
 pictures, you know very crisp clear text, all that sort of stuff really kind of bringing
 together how play content works in conjunction with the hardware and the software.
 One of the amazing things about this screen is its resolution, it's basically print.
 The other way that we sort of have been trying to evolve Google Play is thinking about discovery.
 Within the store now there's a new feature we call the music explorer that allows you
 to look at similar artists of the genre across the store to get some different ideas of bands
 maybe that you hadn't heard about that you would like to know about.
 When I was a kid, my father had this console radio in our living room, it was this gigantic
 piece of furniture and it had this huge knob that you could spin and it would sort of whip
 across a dozen radio stations at once.
 And so we thought like how could we bring that sort of more of an analog discovery experience
 to the tablet.
 You don't want to make a big like analog looking knob that you could flip through.
 Were there early designs that were like a big...
 We're not really about the brushed aluminum so much, but you know I think it's actually
 kind of an interesting thing to bring an explorer that has a vibe that's pretty close to the
 Android aesthetic.
 I mean I think we're actually trying to come up with a certain sort of feel to our UI and
 one that is really informed by the cloud and not the sort of literalness of a radio sitting
 on your desk.
 I feel like you guys have been promising tablet software for a couple of years now.
 Will you have the software and can it be a more attractive price point than the $500,
 $600 tablets that are on the market doing essentially the same thing?
 Well I don't think anybody is doing this.
 Nobody has a tablet that's this thin, nobody has a tablet that is this light and nobody
 has a tablet at this resolution.
 And all that said, it's going to be very competitively priced.
 What about the apps?
 One of the reasons why we were happy with Nexus 7 coming out first is because we really
 wanted to excite the Android ecosystem about the possibility of tablets.
 Apps that are designed with a tablet in mind for Nexus 7 work great on this.
 So you can almost think of Nexus 7 as a bit of a bootstrap to the ecosystem.
 Part of the reason why we've invested significantly in building what you're holding is exactly
 so that we have more and more motivation in the developer community to do that.
 We don't go out and pay people to do stuff.
 We would never do that.
 That's not how Google Developer Relations works.
 But we are trying as hard as we can to develop these ecosystem.
 When there's a significant number or even a trend towards a significant number of tablets
 like this in the market, people will see it.
 Android without these Nexus devices would not be possible.
 And that story of what used to be called lead devices, way back with the T-Mobile G1 with
 HTC, has evolved into more of a brand for end users, that is Nexus.
 And that's, I think, incredibly important to Android as a whole and the Android development
 effort.
 Ultimately, it is up to the ecosystem.
 We can only go so far by ourselves.