What to Expect From Google I/O 2012 - PC Magazine

Google's annual developer congress and county fair, Google I/O, is traditionally a carnival-style grab bag. This year's show, kicking off with a 9:30 a.m. PT keynote on Wednesday, won't be any different. Google's product portfolio always tends towards the manic, with new ideas appearing and vanishing at a pace that would stun phlegmatic Microsoft and laser-focused Apple. So expect something for everyone at I/O this year. In order of consumer interest, though, here's what most piques my interest.

The Google Nexus Tablet
OK, first, people, Google is not making a tablet. This is very important; this is not the Microsoft Surface. Google will be "blessing" an Asus tablet, which is less terrifying for its OEM partners than Microsoft wading into the tablet market and blowing away all its hardware customers.

We actually saw this tablet at CES, when Nvidia head Jen-Hsun Huang showed it off: it's a quad-core Tegra 3-based, 7-inch Asus tablet. Nvidia said at the time that it would cost $249, but most speculation out there right now is that Google will subsidize it down to $200 to compete more effectively with the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet. Google is not thrilled by the idea of the nation's most successful Android tablet being an extreme Android variant with all of Google's services removed.

Making the Nexus Tablet a 7-inch device sidesteps the biggest problem with Android tablets today, which is that many third-party apps look lousy on 10-inch tablets. Apps with user interfaces designed for 4- to 4.5-inch screens look decent on 7-inch screens, so Google will be able to tout 400,000 apps available for this tablet.

Android Jelly Bean and Chrome OS
The very first session at Google I/O is titled "What's New in Android?" What's new will be Jelly Bean, which is reported to be Android 4.1. I'm not expecting Jelly Bean to be a huge upgrade, because Google still hasn't been able to get more than 10 percent of existing Android devices onto Android 4.0, which was a major update.

My out-on-a-limb guess is that Jelly Bean will fold Chrome OS into the Android fold. Chrome OS, on Chromebook laptops and Chromebox desktops, has been a market failure, and there are no tracks on Chrome OS development in the Google I/O lineup.

Jelly Bean may also add a non-beta version of Google's Chrome browser and Google's Assistant voice-recognition technology, which competes with Samsung's S Voice and Apple's Siri in terms of providing smart natural-language searches from voice commands.

Fixing Google Play
One of the first sessions at I/O promises "new developments coming soon from Google Play." I really hope so. Google probably means more HD movies and an improved music store. 

But what Google Play really needs is a better way to sort and filter applications by device, so Android tablet owners don't get stuck with lists of big-name apps that look like WAP pages because the designers have never seen an Android tablet in their lives. Android developers also need more ways to easily make money from their apps, and Google needs to get a handle on the huge quantity of spam and junk apps in the marketplace. Fingers crossed.

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