Google’s future now: LG Nexus 4, Samsung Nexus 10, and Android 4.2

The elusive Nexus 4 wireless charging orb — one of the most striking features of Google’s Android flagship — is finally on sale through Google Play, a few months after the phone’s launch. It’s currently selling for $59.99 in the US, with shipping times quoted as around a week; we’re not yet sure of overall international availability. The Nexus 4 itself has only recently come back in stock on the Play Store, after Google apparently massively underestimated initial demand, so this is fairly good timing. We’ve also seen longer delays on some other Google accessories, like the Nexus 7’s dock. The Nexus 4 orb recalls the now-discontinued Palm Touchstone, and Nokia’s Lumia 920 has also incorporated wireless charging based on the Qi standard.

Today’s the day the Nexus 4 goes on sale, but if you’re a Galaxy Nexus owner not quite ready to upgrade to Google’s latest flagship phone, don’t worry — there’s still something to look forward to. We’re seeing evidence and tips of an over-the-air rollout of Android 4.2 for the Galaxy Nexus, although it appears to be limited to certain users of a certain variant: the unlocked HSPA+ model that was made available through the Google Play Store earlier this year.

However, Phandroid points out that if you’re comfortable with flashing a ROM yourself, you can download the necessary files from Google right now. We’ve contacted Google for comment on when the latest version of Jelly Bean will be made available to other Galaxy Nexus handsets, but it appears that you shouldn’t have too long to wait.

Offering a viable music locker in the cloud is tough when you require users to manually upload every file in their library, but thankfully that won’t be the case for Google Music much longer. As part of its Google Play announcements today, the company revealed that it will finally bring scan and match functionality — already available from both Apple and Amazon — to its service starting November 13th. Matching will debut alongside Google Music in Europe for those in the U.K, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The rollout will extend to the US “soon after” according to Google.

Google’s solution works virtually identically to those offered by the competition: Google Music will scan your library for content that’s available in the Google Play store with any matches becoming instantly available for streaming (and download) without the need for uploading anything. There is one key difference however: unlike Apple, which charges an annual fee for iTunes Match, Google is providing the functionality at no cost. That means you can maintain a library of up to 20,000 songs through Google Music for absolutely free — a distinct advantage over Amazon’s Cloud Player which maxes out at a measly 250 songs unless you decide to pay for more storage.

By Dieter Bohn and Nilay Patel

The Nexus 4 is an impressive smartphone that ticks off every modern spec checkbox you could ask for, save one: LTE. Instead, the Nexus 4 will only come unlocked with HSPA+ radios. It is a disappointing omission, driven by both Google’s complex philosophical desire to build open devices as well as the fairly simple economics of building a halo product for a small niche of early adopters.

Google’s campus in Mountain View is a weird place — a sprawling, flat expanse dotted with angular, gray buildings. And lots of colorful bikes. It feels like an island, a place with its own set of rules, and it’s easy to feel out of joint if you don’t know the handshake. In some ways it’s like a corporate realization of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones... save for, you know, the corporation. It’s the kind of place where the uniquely Silicon Valley meshing of childish whimsy and a fervent, quasi-religious work ethic is in full swing. A place where coding ideas and how-tos for relaxation are printed and hung in the men’s bathrooms above the urinals. It’s charming and bizarre in equal parts.

The last time I had trekked across the country and south of San Francisco was in September of 2011, to see the Android team’s new flagship phone and a version of its operating system that was set to change the face of the line completely. Those products were the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), important releases for Google that proved the company had started to embrace design and user experience as much as its competition had. That time around, I spent a few hours with Android’s head of user experience — the colorful Matias Duarte — to explore the new look and feel of the software, hear his reasoning behind bold decisions like the in-house-designed Roboto font, and play with the Samsung-produced phone.

The new Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 aren’t just new Android devices — they’re showcases for a new version of Android. Google’s calling Android 4.2 “a new flavor of Jelly Bean” to reflect its essential similarity to Android 4.1, but there are some major new features in the mix.

The highlight is support for Miracast, an industry-standard Wi-Fi display sharing protocol that allows new devices like the Nexus 4 to stream audio and video to TVs. (Think AirPlay with broad industry support.) Miracast boxes for existing TVs are expected to go on sale from a variety of companies soon, and Google expects them to cost well under $99. And Miracast will soon be built directly into TVs, which is pretty exciting — LG’s already committed to building it into all of its 2013 smart TVs. The technology worked quite well in our demo of Android 4.2 on a Nexus 4, and Google says developers can use each screen independently for big-screen gaming and other apps.

One of the big features of the new Google Nexus 4 smartphone is support for wireless charging, and so alongside the phone Google is releasing the aptly-named Wireless Charging Orb. Shaped like a sphere sliced crosswise, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Palm’s Touchstone. The face of the dock is set at an angle so you can easily see the phone, and it’s finished with a soft-touch plastic that should ensure that it won’t mar the glass back of the Nexus 4. Google tells us that it’s using the Qi wireless charging standard, so charging pads designed for Nokia’s Lumia phones should also work on the Nexus 4.

Google’s Wireless Charging Orb takes inspiration from the Touchstone in several other ways. As mentioned above, the phone sits at an angle on the dock — a feature that only works because both the dock and the Nexus 4 have magnets inside them — just like Palm Pre phones. You can orient the phone in either portrait or landscape as well. The other major feature Google borrowed from Palm is a feature in Android 4.2 called “Daydream.” It displays photos, news from Google Currents, or other information when the phone is docked. That same feature was available on webOS, then called Exhibition. Whatever the source of ideas may be, it will make the Nexus 4 a little more useful as it’s charging on your desk.

For decades, visions of the future have played with the magical possibilities of computers: they’ll know where you are, what you want, and can access all the world’s information with a simple voice prompt. That vision hasn’t come to pass, yet, but features like Apple’s Siri and Google Now offer a keyhole peek into a near future reality where your phone is more “Personal Assistant” than “Bar bet settler.” The difference is that the former actually understands what you need while the latter is a blunt search instrument.

Google Now is one more baby step in that direction. Introduced this past June with Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean,” it’s designed to ambiently give you information you might need before you ask for it. To pull off that ambitious goal, Google takes advantage of multiple parts of the company: comprehensive search results, robust speech recognition, and most of all Google’s surprisingly deep understanding of who you are and what you want to know.

Google has officially unveiled the new Nexus 10 tablet running Android 4.2. Built by Samsung but clearly designed by Google, the tablet features a very impressive 10-inch screen at 2560 x 1600 resolution, clocking in at 300ppi. Google calls it “True RGB Real Stripe PLS,” and in our short time with the tablet we found it to be on par with the iPad’s Retina display, with sharp text, excellent color fidelity, and great viewing angles.

It will come in 16GB or 32GB variants and will be Wi-Fi only. The processor behind the tablet is a powerful dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 chip paired with 2GB of RAM, likely of the Samsung Exynos variety, with a quad-core Mali T604 GPU inside — and combined with the speed improvements of Android 4.2 we were hard-pressed to see any sort of lag when swiping around the interface. There’s a 5-megapixel camera around back if you’re into taking photos with your tablet and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera. The battery has a 9,000mAh capacity, which Google says should be good for up to 9 hours of HD video playback, and likely forms the bulk of the 604 gram weight of the device. It also features dual, front-facing speakers for audio, microUSB, Micro HDMI and not one but two NFC chips, one on the front and one on the back.

Other than the 32GB of storage and the radio, the specs on the tablet are the same as the version we’ve already seen, including the 1280 x 800 IPS display, Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, and 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera. Presumably it will ship with Android 4.2 out of the box. The Nexus 7 (32GB + Mobile) will be available on November 13th. As with the other Nexus devices, it will be sold via the Google Play Store, specifically in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, and Canada.

Update: Along with the new HSPA+ model, Google has revamped the pricing of the entire Nexus 7 line. The original 16GB model now costs $199, with a 32GB model — sans the cellular radio — coming in at $249. It’s an aggressive line-up for Google, with the company now providing three different 7-inch options, all of which are cheaper than Apple’s iPad mini.

Google has officially announced the Nexus 4, the latest phone in its Nexus line of flagship Android devices. Built by LG, the phone features a 4.7-inch 1280 x 768 IPS display, a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor — which Google claims is the fastest on the market — an 8 megapixel camera and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, and up to 16GB of storage. Oh, and the back is made of glass — etched, layered glass that sparkles with a strange, almost holographic depth.

Not much of that should be surprising, as the phone had been thoroughly leaked around the web in the past few weeks. What is surprising is how much better it all looks in person. Compared to the LG Optimus G, which shares many of the same components, it’s no contest — the Nexus 4 is a far nicer piece of hardware. It feels weighty and high-end, and the tight construction combined with the soft-touch plastic on the sides and chrome edging give it a solidly executive vibe — a vibe that’s balanced nicely by the playfulness of Disco City on the back.