Google news

Google has launched two new mod­els of its own phone, the Nexus, which are de­signed to make the most of the com­pany's in-house op­er­at­ing sys­tem, An­droid, and re­turn in some ways to its ori­gins by of­fer­ing ad­van­tages at entry level at a more rea­son­able price than the com­pe­ti­tion. The an­nounce­ment by the CEO Sun­dar Pichai came just a few hours after Apple posted a new sales record with their new and much vaunted iPhone with 13 mil­lion units sold in the first three days. The new Apple hit Cata­lan stores in early Oc­to­ber and is priced at 749 euros.

As Apple has done, Google also wanted to offer two mod­els of dif­fer­ent sizes, al­though in this case the two dif­fer some­what in func­tion­al­ity. As with pre­vi­ous mod­els, the pro­duc­tion has been out­sourced to third party man­u­fac­tur­ers. The larger model, the Nexus 6P, will have a 5.7 inch screen and is pro­duced by the Chi­nese firm Huawei, while the 5X (5.2 inches) is man­u­fac­tured by the South Ko­rean LG. Both mod­els use the lat­est ver­sion of An­droid, dubbed Marsh­mal­low (known here as the Candy Cloud). This op­er­at­ing sys­tem will be avail­able here im­me­di­ately on re­lease for for ex­ist­ing Nexus users. The com­pany's mo­bile plat­form is a key el­e­ment in Google's strat­egy to make the most of rev­enue from on­line ad­ver­tis­ing, as com­puter nav­i­ga­tion leans to­ward Apps.

Both the Nexus 6P and the Nexus 5X in­cor­po­rate a dig­i­tal fin­ger­print sen­sor on the back, which al­lows ac­cess to the phone with a sim­ple touch and ID con­fir­ma­tion for pur­chases in stores using An­droid Pay's au­to­matic pay­ment sys­tem. Both de­vices also fea­ture a 12.3 megapixel cam­era with bet­ter per­for­mance and the abil­ity to record 4K video.

The main dif­fer­ence is with the front cam­era and its eight megapix­els for the 6MP while the Nexus 5X re­mains at 5MP RAM. Both phones also have a new func­tion to process data col­lected by the var­i­ous sen­sors and de­ter­mine if users are walk­ing, run­ning or rid­ing a bi­cy­cle, so that the user can record any phys­i­cal ac­tiv­ity at all times. The basic mod­els of the Nexus 5X will sell for 379 dol­lars and 6P for 499 dol­lars. Both in­clude free ac­cess to the Google Play Music ser­vice for 90 days, but it is not yet known how much they will cost here nor when they will be­come avail­able.

This is the first time that Google has launched two phones at the same time since it began its Nexus pro­gramme in 2010 and it could be in­ter­preted as an at­tempt to keep up with Apple, which has rapidly re­gained the ad­van­tage in high-end phones.

As well as the phones, Google also an­nounced its first An­droid-pow­ered tablet, man­u­fac­tured en­tirely by the com­pany. It is called Pixel C and will have a start­ing price of 499 dol­lars. It can ac­com­mo­date a key­board, sug­gest­ing that Google plans to to com­pete with the likes of the iPad Pro or Mi­crosoft Sur­face, aimed more to­wards pro­duc­tiv­ity and en­ter­tain­ment.

Throw­ing cau­tion to the wind, the Moun­tain View (Cal­i­for­nia) giant also pre­sented a new ver­sion of Chrome­cast, a de­vice to stream con­tent from a PC or mo­bile to the TV, as well as a sim­i­lar model to wire­lessly con­nect to speak­ers and play music.