Google I/O ended yesterday, and honestly, I'm still digesting it all. They announced a lot. I mean, Google always announces a lot, they've got this thing where they just start talking about projects and don't really stop, but some of it actually feels significant.
The Nexus 7 is the thing everyone's talking about. Seven inches, $199, and it runs Jelly Bean which is still basically fresh off the grill. I haven't held one yet (nobody outside Google has), but the specs are solid for the price. Samsung and ASUS can probably hear Google circling now. The tablet market is still kind of a mess anyway, right? Everyone assumed iPads would dominate everything forever and then it turned out people actually want cheap Android tablets.
But I'm more interested in Google Now than the hardware, if I'm being honest. They barely spent time on it in the presentation, buried it in the Android demos, but it's the thing I keep thinking about. They're basically saying "okay, we've watched Siri, we've seen what Apple's trying to do, now watch how we do it with actual data." The idea is that it serves you information you didn't ask for but probably need. Weather, traffic, travel times to places you go, stuff like that. It sounds creepy if you think about it for more than a second (Google knowing where you go, when you go, which routes you take), but it also sounds genuinely useful in a way that Siri feels like a party trick.
The weird thing about this moment is how much the whole industry is just waiting. Facebook went public like two weeks ago and people are already arguing about whether the stock's overvalued. Apple's quiet right now; they always are after they've made big announcements, which was the iPhone 4S last fall. Microsoft's pushing Windows 8 and nobody can really tell yet whether that's the right direction or a disaster in the making. And Google's acting like they've got time to just throw ideas at the wall.
Jelly Bean itself seems incremental. There's better notification handling (finally, something Gmail on Android has been missing), and they're talking about responsiveness improvements. Project Butter is their name for it, which is either brilliant or terrible depending on how you feel about cute codenames. The bigger thing is that Android's moving fast now. There was a time when it felt like Android was just trying to catch up to iOS. Now it actually feels like they're doing their own thing, which is probably scarier for Apple than if Google was just copying.
I spent way too long thinking about whether I should get the Nexus 7. I don't really need another device. I've got a phone that does most of what I need, I've got a laptop for actual work, and a tablet feels like it would just be something else to charge and update. But $199 is cheap enough that you can almost justify it as an experiment. That's the play here, I think. Google's not trying to outsell iPads. They're trying to make tablets cheap enough that everyone owns one, and then see what happens.
The stuff that actually matters—the stuff that'll shape how we interact with phones and computers for the next five years—isn't the Nexus 7. It's Google Now and what it means for how companies think about anticipatory interfaces. When your phone knows where you're going before you open Google Maps, when it knows you need traffic information because it knows you're about to leave for work, that's a different kind of device. That's not a computer you carry around. That's something that's trying to understand your life.
Whether that's creepy or useful depends entirely on whether you trust Google, and I think most people are starting to just... accept it. It's not even a question anymore.