SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. touted new models of smart watches, connected cars and Internet-enabled TVs on Wednesday, all based on the company’s Android software, as the giant tech company showed its determination to extend its services into just about every corner of modern life.
The company also gave an early look at the next version of Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, while stressing its goal of providing consumers with the same quality of experience on gadgets of all shapes and sizes – from PCs to smartphones, tablets, watches and TV sets.
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“We want to create a seamless experience across all these devices,” Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai told an audience of 6,000 independent software developers and other tech workers on the opening day of Google’s annual I/O conference at the Moscone convention center.
Pichai, who is emerging as one of Google’s most powerful leaders under CEO Larry Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, oversees the company’s Android and Chrome software divisions. While leading a keynote session that lasted 21/2 hours, he also announced a new initiative to build a low-cost Android smartphone for consumers in emerging nations. And he repeatedly stressed a theme that might be summarized as “Android everywhere.”
That was the message, at least, for software developers who Google hopes will build a host of new apps and services for its Android platform. The message to consumers, according to Gartner tech analyst Brian Blau, seems to be: “Enjoy Google services wherever you are.”
Google “always needs more users and more devices interacting with their services,” Blau explained, since the company makes the bulk of its $60 billion in annual revenue by selling ads that appear with some of those services. But Google is locked in an intense battle with other tech giants, including Apple and Microsoft, that want consumers to use their competing products.
Some of the products demonstrated Wednesday, in fact, are similar to initiatives launched by Apple, Samsung and other tech companies in recent months. But Pichai and other Google executives stressed that the Android platform is designed so each new product will be synchronized with other Android devices.
A smart watch that runs Google’s Android Wear software, for example, is meant to communicate closely with its owner’s Android phone. In a separate demonstration, Google representatives used a mock-up of a car’s front seat and dash board to show the Android Auto software that Google has developed for carmakers, which lets a driver use voice controls to get directions, answer text messages and play music that streams from an Android phone.
Google also took the wraps off “Android TV,” a long-rumored effort to compete with similar products from other companies.
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