It took Google eight years from when the first Android phone was released to finally design and build phones the way Apple does with its iPhones. Yesterday, Google released its homegrown Pixel phones and going by what was shown in the event, it's probably the smartest smartphone ever made. It's not the hardware specs of the phone, though the hardware packed in these devices are nothing short of the best available in the market. You get 5-inch and 5.5-inch AMOLED displays, the Snapdragon 821 processor which is currently the fastest processor from Qualcomm's stable, 4GB of RAM, either 32GB or 128GB of onboard storage, fingerprint scanner at the back, a big battery and a rear camera that industry standards say is better than iPhone 7's and Galaxy S7 Edge's.
But these hardware specs don't make the Pixel phones special. In probably a few months, we'll see a bunch of phones from other Android manufacturers running on similar hardware, but what they won't get is the fine tuned software that comes bundled with the Pixel phones.
It is indeed the software that sets these babies apart from the rest of the crowded smartphone market. Google has infused years of hard work in AI in the Pixel phone in the form of Google Assistant, so much so, that the Pixel phones can hold a breezy conversation with you.
Gone are the days when you had to pick up the phone, unlock it, and type out your need. With Google Assistant, you just use your voice to do everything that is normally done on a smartphone. Book a cab, get a restaurant reservation, text your mom, call a friend, open apps, pause and resume music and more.
But this is something even Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana can also do, so what makes Google Assistant in the Google Pixel phones special? It is Google's tendency to maintain an open ecosystem, without the walls that Apple has meticulously set up around Siri. Apps in Google's Pixel phones can harness the power of Google's knowledge graph, which is the entirety of what Google knows about everything.
What's more, Google has set up an entire ecosystem of smart home appliances like televisions, watches, tablets, laptops and now even a smart home speaker, and with Google Assistant infused in all of them, they can all talk to each other.
With the Pixel phones, this is what Google is setting the ground up for. Internet of Things has struggled, but with in this case, it shall sprint like Usain Bolt to people's homes.
Virtual Reality too fits into the frame of things. The Daydream platform is big and it is here to stay. If Steve Jobs took over the music industry with iTunes, this will be Clay Bavor, Google's Head of VR's chance to do the same with the virtual reality content ecosystem, in the form of Daydream. And with the Pixel phones being the first compatible phone with the Daydream View (an inexpensive, made-for-the-masses-yet-premium) VR headset, it will be a signal to the smartphone industry where to put their money at.
Manufacturers waged a spec-sheet war during the early years of Android. Google had developed a standard mobile operating system that was openly compatible with just about everything, and all the phone-makers had to do was challenge each other in terms of hardware.
But now, the scenario has changed. For the first time, growth in smartphones sales has flattened. It was time to move on from shoving the fastest, and the best possible hardware up people's mouth, to giving them a reason to harness all that firepower in their palms. With the Pixel and the Pixel XL, Google is giving that reason and once again paving the way for others to follow.
P.S: The 3.5mm headphone jack still fits into the frame of things for Google somehow.
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