According to reports, this week will see the launch of the first Google branded smartphones as part of a device release batch. The Google phone will come with an Echo-like “smart speaker” that responds to the human voice. Other hardware expected this week includes Home — a direct Echo competitor.
The move marks something of a departure for Google, which has mostly eschewed hardware development in favor of building out their software and services empire — but times are changing, and as competitors at Apple and Amazon are building out their hardware niches, Google is making a grab for ground.
The new devices are about Google “owning more of the hardware category,” said Jan Dawson, senior analyst at Jackdaw Research, though he notes the hardware itself is still really “about showing partners the way forward.” Google has made light moves in this direction before — there was a very brief attempt to make mid-range devices when it owned Motorola. Nexus phones are co-branded with device makers and act as delivery mechanisms for its Android software.
About four out of every five smartphones shipped on Earth already carry Google’s OS — but that 20 percent that Apple holds happens to be most desirable, most affluent and most prone to spend, as evidenced by the widening gap between purchases made in the Apple Apps store and the Google Play store.
As for market distribution — instead of relying on a direct sales via the web (i.e. The Nexus model), the new Google phone will include partnerships with mobile carriers, though the details on how exactly that will work won’t be announced till later this week.
Can Google win with this new push into hardware? Hard to say at the outset. Phones are not an easy market to crack in the U.S. — ask Amazon, which needed almost a full year to get the world to forget how hard the Fire phone flopped. And though the push into voice control and AI is in line with the times, the question remains: can they close the gap with Amazon and its significant lead with the Echo?
But Google, unlike Amazon, is the controlling part behind the OS that runs every non-iPhone on Earth, giving them something of an advantage — and if the competition is to see who can build the best and most desirable AI and search software in the world —well, anyone should be nervous about going head-to-head with Google on that.
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