Google's gadget game

“Been awhile since I was this excited about a Google event,” tweeted one tech blogger 30 minutes before the Nexus launch started. Maybe I am getting old and jaded, but it has been a while since I got really excited about any tech event, and this one was no exception.

Which is not to say that the five devices unveiled by Google were disappointing. In fact, the two phones, two streaming devices and the tablet shown off in an hour-long presentation all looked pretty clever additions to Google’s hardware range. None, however, was particularly innovative and I’m still struggling to work out exactly what a firm whose wealth is built on software is doing making gadgets.

Take the Nexus 6P, the new flagship smartphone, built with Huawei. It will showcase Google’s latest operating system Android Marshmallow and will offer just about everything that any other top of the range phone has, from a fingerprint sensor to a camera that works well in low light. It is made by Huawei, which has struggled in the United States over security concerns, so for the Chinese firm it is a handy way of getting its brand more accepted by American customers.

But surely every other Android manufacturer, and especially Samsung, will be dismayed by the arrival of a very keenly priced smartphone in what is a very competitive market? Making profits from Android phones is really tough - in recent years only Samsung has managed to pull it off, and even the Korean giant is finding it ever harder. Yet the firm behind the operating system which dominates the industry in terms of market share seems not to care too much about nurturing its partners’ bottom line.

The new version of Google’s Chromecast TV streaming device is also entering another crowded market. The company says it has already sold 20 million of the previous model, making it the fastest selling product of its kind. Here, companies like Amazon and the much smaller Roku are the competition.

Then there is a new Chromecast audio device, which you can plug into any existing speaker to stream music from your phone or services like Spotify. That in theory poses a threat to the multi-room streaming music hardware firm Sonos, though it is targeting a different kind of customer with the launch of a new high-end speaker.

And finally, there is the Pixel, the first tablet that Google has built on its own. It comes with a detachable keyboard, and so looks very similar to Microsoft’s Surface, which itself was recently copied by Apple’s iPad Pro. In its press release Google even asks “how does this compare to the iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard? What about the Microsoft Surface?” before going on to say it can’t speak about other products but is proud of its tablet’s innovative features.

Here is a company that still seems eager to prove itself in the hardware realm. But, apart perhaps from the Chromecast, none of its products has so far set the world on fire, and the revenue from all of them is negligible compared to the huge sums generated by search.