It is June 2012, and Google is a very different company. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was the latest and greatest, the original Chromecast was still a year away from launch, Android TV was two years away, and Google Home wouldn’t launch for two more years after that. At its annual Google I / O developer conference, Google announces a completely baffling device: the Nexus Q.
For those who have not been in the Android world for so long, they will have absolutely no idea what the Nexus Q was. And even if you know about the Nexus Q, you probably never saw or used one.
First, the basics: The Nexus Q was a media transmitter designed to connect to your home theater system and be remotely controlled by phone applications; It had no interface of its own, aside from the ability to rotate the top of the dial for volume and tap to play / pause. This bullet launch orb was particularly unique because it did not fit any traditional mold of home theater equipment, and that was the point. It was large, matte black, spherical and heavy, and an LED ring changed color to give you status information.
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From a nerdy perspective, it’s even more interesting when you look at what’s inside: this worked on Android! Actually the then next-generation Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and it did so with a smartphone-style dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. This intriguing little cannonball was also packed with connectivity: Wi-Fi, ethernet, micro HDMI, optical audio, and banana plugs for analog audio.
But even though all Of that power and connectivity, the Nexus Q did just three things: It played Google Play Music, Google Play Movies & TV, and YouTube. If that is. Now him road However, playing media was novel at the time: instead of using an interface and remote control on the Nexus Q itself, you simply used the Play Music, Play Moves & TV and YouTube apps on your phone to queue the content. Everyone in the room could see and add to the queue, aiming for a fun and collaborative media experience.
The Nexus Q was over built, barely capable and very expensive, but it was wonderful.
We knew that the Nexus Q … was not a great product, even at the time. All of that incredibly overbuilt hardware was expensive. At $ 300, the same price as the Nexus 4 would debut later that year, the Nexus Q did indeed have a zero potential market. But we still loved it because it was completely designed for everything it did, used Android in a whole new way, and had a lot of promise as a concept. It was a very “Google” product.
In May 2013, less than a year after it was introduced, and having never officially gone on sale, Google completely ended support for the product. A small amount of Nexus Q came into the world, either through gifts on Google I / O or a small number of people who pre-ordered them and their money was returned to them as consolation.
But the Nexus Q died in order to live dramatically better future products. As I pointed out from the beginning, we can see Nexus Q DNA live in other incredibly successful products. The first Chromecast, which revolutionized the world of media streaming, was clearly based on the Nexus Q’s idea of a headless media player and content queues from a variety of devices. Android TV took over the other side of the equation, with a dedicated media player and more power. And you can even redraw the lineage from the original Google Home on the Nexus Q, both from the interfaceless Casting experience and from the physical input mechanisms of turning and touching the surface.
There was probably not a time or a world when the Nexus Q could have launched and succeeded, even if Google Really enhanced the experience and unleashed the potential of the device. But it still holds a special place in the hearts of early Android enthusiasts, and its legacy can be found today in all Google products, regardless of whether people really remember it.
