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Podcasts - Season 3, Episode 1
In with the new Pixel Fold, Pixel 7a, and Pixel Tablet
To kick off Season 3 of the Made by Google Podcast, we take a deep dive into the new devices launched in May at Google I/O 2023
New kids on the block

Announced at Google I/O 2023, Pixel Fold, Pixel 7a, and the Pixel Tablet are the latest devices to step onto Google’s stage and into customers’ hands. But what sets these products apart? Product managers George Hwang, Justin Savich, and Chris Chan cover it all in this episode of the Made by Google Podcast – from the details behind the designs to the development and delivery of the newest additions to the Pixel portfolio. 

Everything by design 

These three new devices have very different form factors and functions, but there’s one consistent element: the Tensor G2 processor. Google’s flagship Tensor G2 chip brings efficiencies and expert photography capabilities to life with Pixel 7a, and it powers multitasking on Pixel Fold and the Pixel Tablet. Designed for smooth operation and powerful functionality, Tensor G2 enhances the entertainment and productivity potential of each device. 

While they share the same processor, each device was designed with different customers and purposes in mind. The Pixel Tablet was created to go anywhere in your hand, but also work as your home’s smart hub when placed in the Charging Speaker Dock. Pixel Fold is Google’s first foldable phone, combining the helpfulness of Pixel with a design that unfolds into a compact tablet. As for Pixel 7a, the latest A-Series phone that delivers all the helpfulness of Google for less, let’s just say it’s the right phone (and the right price) for anyone.  

Pixel-perfect

We can’t talk about the latest and greatest in Pixel devices without bringing up the cameras. New to Pixel 7a is the Long Exposure feature, which helps add the dramatic effect of a blurred background for an artistic touch in photos. Pixel 7a also features Super Res Zoom, now hitting up to 8x, and an updated Night Sight that’s twice as fast as Pixel 6a’s. Pixel Fold also holds a state-of-the-art camera system with new capabilities enabled by the design – such as astrophotography without a tripod,1 hands-free tabletop mode, and Rear Camera Selfie mode for the highest-quality selfies on a Pixel.

Tune in to the Made by Google Podcast to hear more from Google’s product experts on the newest additions to the Pixel portfolio. 

Transcript

Rachid (00:00): Gentlemen, thank you for joining the Made By Google Podcast.

Now, before we talk about the brand new lineup of Pixel products, could you tell us a little bit more about your role at Google and how you ended up here? Justin let’s start with you.

Justin Savich (00:12): Yeah thanks so much for having me. I’m Justin Savich. I’m a senior product manager at Google, specifically working on the newly launched Pixel 7a. I’ve been at Google for, gosh, just about 10 years now and have supported mobile for my entire experience here, but been a PM on the Pixel team for about the past five years.

Really looking forward to sharing more about what we've been up to and the latest product that we have for the A series today.

Rachid (00:38): Amazing. A decade of mobile at Google. Much has changed in that decade for sure. George, great to see you. What do you do at Google?

George Hwang (00:46): Yeah, thanks, Rachid. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name is George Hwang. I’m a product manager as well on Pixel. I work on all things that fold, particularly the Pixel Fold. And I’ve spent six years at Google, almost six years.

Rachid (01:08): Amazing. And we'll get into foldables a little bit later today. And Chris, finally,

Chris (01:14): Thanks for having me. I’m Chris, a product manager at Google, focused on the new Pixel tablet. My focus is on flagship hardware and software. Much of what we’re here to talk about today.

I’ve been at Google for just under six years, like George I previously worked on some of our smart speaker products like Nest Audio, Nest Mini, and Google Home Max. Really excited to be here to share what's new.

Rachid (01:36): Thank you, Chris. And I’m sure there are a lot of favorites in there. Nest Audio for many of our listeners. Now, one thing we do like to do on the podcast is do some deep research into our guests which means we go into our internal directory where every Googler can state their own mission. I just wanted to run them by you, see, see why, why you chose it as your mission. Now, Justin yours is fairly straightforward, hashtag Pixel for the win.

Justin Savich (02:03): Yeah, I think it was a declarative letter of statement. You know, obviously I think like all others on this call were, I’m a fairly competitive person. You know, we got into this business to really redefine the mobile experience and deliver all the helpfulness of Google to our users. If we do a really good job of that we can attract a lot of people to use our products. And so yeah, that was my little testament to why I’m here and getting up every day to come work at Google.

Rachid (02:30): That’s some great motivation right there, George Power pixels everywhere.

George Hwang (02:35): Sure. I’m probably not as great as Justin there, and this has not been updated, I would say in three or four years.

As I said before, I worked on accessories and smartwatches, things that supported the Pixel ecosystem and the Pixel brand. And so that’s why that’s there. But I think it works well for Pixel as well. So I’ll leave it.

Rachid (02:52): Definitely does. And then Chris went in a whole other direction. Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis. So what if you had to pick just one of those two? That's the one. I think we're all, we're all on the same page, I think.

Definitely. Now let’s get into completely different hardware today. What brought us together, the three all new Pixel devices revealed at Google I/O yesterday, and I wanted to kick off with Pixel 7a. We’ve of course already seen the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro last October.

But can you walk us through what is new and exciting about Pixel’s 7th generation, A series phone?

Justin Savich (03:32): Yeah, I know that’s a great question. You know, the A series has always been an interesting engineering challenge. It’s always about bringing these premium level features down to a more accessible price point.

It’s really the entry point for many users into all of the helpfulness that we have to offer as pixel compared to previous generations. You know, Pixel 7a, you can expect a lot more in terms of AI heavy breakthroughs delivered through everyday helpful experiences across speech, photography, video and security.

You know, at the heart of, of this device and, and the devices with the other products represented by Chris and George on this call is Google Tensor G2, and that’s our latest and greatest custom in-house SOC. And, and that's really fantastic because it allows us to platform the experiences from our very flagship level products all the way into the A series.

One of the big developments is actually what’s going on on the inside of the device this year. Kudos to the engineering team. We’ve completely re-architected the internals of the device. Introducing an all new mid frame architecture. We really wanted to focus on durability protecting the inevitable when a device accidentally falls or drops and hits the ground. And so with this new change in architecture, we’re really pleased to say that the Pixel 7a is our most durable series device yet. So awesome to be able to deliver that to customers.

When we look at the design itself you know, no surprises. It shares a similar sort of design language as the more premium pixel seven and seven pro, you know, highlighting that iconic pixel camera bar along the backend as well as the kind of smooth sculpted surfaces along the sides of the device. But, you know, you asked a good question, like, what’s new with this year?

I’m really happy that I think more so than any other year in the past, we've delivered a ton of new first of kind technologies for the A series. We’ve got a 90 hertz display and wireless charging. We upgraded the RAM to eight gigabytes just to give a more performant experience. And then of course we’re enabling face unlock for a convenient unlocked modality for all users.

So really excited about bringing all those things to light. And, it wouldn't be a Pixel device if it didn't have a fantastic camera experience. And of course, this device is no different. We went all in on camera this year with the A-series for the past four generations of products. We’ve had the same front and rear camera sensors. We’re really excited about doing something different. And so everything has been fully upgraded from the ultra wide to the main to the front cam.

It just delivers a fantastic experience across all the helpful photography experiences that we offer at this lower cost price point.

Rachid (06:20): So what is the proudest achievement? Building 7a?

Justin Savich (06:25): Yeah, this probably isn’t going to land on a billboard necessarily, but it really is the engineering feat that we accomplished in delivering such a well-constructed product, introducing this all new mid frame architecture.

the team just did a fantastic job. We really worked on maximizing the space delivering still a great large battery in the product itself while keeping the dimensions pocketable and, you know, great for users. But yeah, I would have to say it's this, this achievement that we've been able to deliver with the actual engineering and construction of the device.

Rachid (07:01): Excellent. And then just to make sure I didn't forget them charcoal, we got snow, we got coral and we got sea. What's your favorite one?

Justin Savich (07:10): Yeah, that's a great question. I'd like to consider myself a little out there and, and we have this beautiful, vibrant coral color. Yeah, so I think if push came to shove, I'd probably say that that's you know, the flashy sort of device. But you know, it is only a Google Store exclusive color.

We're making it available in select markets, through our first party channel and, and really excited to be able to deliver that fresh sort of spring light color to users.

Rachid (07:43): Thanks, Justin. Now, the second device we're talking about today is Google Pixel's first foldable phone, the Pixel Fold. In today's exciting world of Foldables, Google certainly made an entrance last night. Now, George, why did we make a foldable?

George Hwang (07:58): Yeah, it's a great question. And we've been working on Foldables for quite a bit. Well, I've been working on Foldables for a long time. So first and foremost, I'm really excited to get it out there and get the feedback from users.

But back to your question, you know, we've been researching and looking at the data for quite a bit, and what we saw is that really only 4% of phone buyers were considering a foldable phone purchase. But then when you actually zoom out a little bit, you actually see 65% of the US phone purchasers stated interest in foldable phones. So we scratched our heads and we were thinking like, why is that?

And so we actually went to go use a lot of the phones at the time, you know, we talked to users, did a lot of user research. We saw four key things. The form factors were awkward. And this is weird because the phone is the device that you use the most. If you change the form factor, you change the way you use the device that you use the most. So there's that, there's durability, there's something not there.

Some great experiences that you expect from a flagship phone, like camera, I think Justin talked about that, you know, yeah, that was kind of lacking as well. As these just generalized experiences within the software were underwhelming as well. So we really tried to take a different tact, and it really did start with the form factor.

We, you know, really dove into that and tried to balance having, you know, the best phone and the best tablet in one. And a really important element of that.

George Hwang (09:20): And hopefully for all of those that get to see and feel this device, we really try to make it thin. And the difficult part is that it's thinner than one of our traditional devices when folded, but you still have to pack all that flagship goodness in there and bring that to our users. So for numbers wise, it's six millimeters thin, and that's about two thirds one of our regular phones.

So a lot of work went into that. And to give you an example, what that means is that we actually had to re-architect and re-engineer and rethink how we actually laid out a phone and the components and whatnot. And a great example of that is something like the camera. We designed all of that from the ground up to ensure that, you know, we could balance giving you a great camera experience in a envelope like that. But also bring all those experiences that you expect from Pixel and the quality that you expect from Pixel - plus really utilizing this type of form factor where you have many cameras, you have two different displays, and a hinge which I’m about to get into that holds its state to kind of give you new experiences.

George Hwang (10:30): The hinge is the key thing that really kind of enables all this, and I'm really excited to kind of share that, you know, it's our custom fluid friction hinge that enables all of this and really gives you all the capabilities of this phone.

Rachid (10:43): I guess that that hinge is probably the thing that most consumers don't really think about. While at the same time for you as a, you know, working on the product, it's probably one of the most important and maybe also one of the most difficult things to get right.

George Hwang (10:57): Yeah, exactly. It is. I could probably say it is the most important. That partnered with that foldable display, they work in tandem together, so you can't really separate the two.

Yeah, the team has been working on that for a long time and really trying to master that and think of everything - thinking about the force and the torque needed to kind of open it, how it feels across the entire range. And then even things like how does it shut close and how does that feel to the user?

And then one thing I didn't mention is that because this can hold its own state, you could have different types of modes where you could actually lay the phone down, like on a table and we'll call it tabletop mode such that it could be kind of in a laptop posture, right? That is really dependent on the hinge and making sure that that's sturdy.

But it does open up a lot of different opportunities, like, you know, taking a group selfie or watching YouTube with the content on the top and maybe controls on the bottom. And so it does give us new opportunities and new things to think through.

Rachid (11:53): So let me get this right. So when it's folded, it mostly looks like a traditional smartphone, I suppose. Then you open it up, then basically you have twice the width of the screen you had just before then what happens? Like, what difference am I going to see on the screen, for example?

George Hwang (12:12): Sure, yeah. So, yeah, the key thing that we focused on was very much to give you a smartphone silhouette when unfolded. So the aspect ratio on the size is similar, akin to a smartphone.

Because what we did want to offer is when you did fully unfold that you unfolded it into a tablet kind of landscape orientation with a 7.6 inch display. So obviously it gives you the best of both worlds. Something compact that you can travel with, have in your hand utilize and do all the great things you want to do with your smartphone. And then when you want to, you know, be more immersed, more entertained, more productive you can actually unfold the phone.

Rachid (12:49): That's amazing. And it definitely looked great yesterday. Now Chris, let's get to the Pixel tablet. Maybe you can tell us a little bit of backstory about how the device came to be and, you know, probably you had to reimagine a little bit what a tablet is.

Chris (13:04): Sure. It started with looking at how tablets are used today, and our research uncovered that tablets are homebodies, meaning that they spend a majority of their lives in the home, and yet they often sit unused, neglected, collecting dust. And then those few moments when you actually do need it and you pick it up, the battery's either really low or completely dead. This can be really frustrating.

So we developed the charging speaker dock as a way to give the tablet a home and to ultimately make it more useful when you're not directly using it to ensure that the tablet is always charged and ready to go, but also more useful when you're not holding the tablet itself.

Rachid (13:46): That sounds amazing. So you have to come up with something to easily dock the Pixel Tablet on the, the, the charging speaker dock. So what's involved in making that easy for me as a user?

Chris (13:59): That's right. We wanted the interaction and the docking experience to be so seamless that you always wanted to return the tablet to its home on a daily basis. So we collaborated with our research and design teams to develop a unique magnet array and, and actually went through 60 iterations to find that sweet spot where the magnetic force was strong enough so that you couldn't accidentally knock the tablet off of the dock but weak enough so that when you did want to pull it off, it could ultimately come off really easily, even with one hand.

It's a slight learning curve, but after you figure it out for the first couple times, it becomes really easy and intuitive. It's just a delight to use regularly.

Rachid (14:41): And then as we saw yesterday, once you dock it, the whole software experience changes, right?

Chris (14:46): That's right. So when it's docked, the tablet enters a different mode, which we call hub mode. And hub mode is a set of experiences to make the tablet more useful. It includes a digital photo frame, a powerful smart home controller, a shared entertainment experience, and hands free help from the Google Assistant.

Rachid (15:05): I guess. Chris and George, you both have maybe some similar work to that had to be done when it comes to apps, right? Because they had to work on a bigger screen compared to apps on a regular smartphone. So what, what's the kind of thing that had to be done to make those apps work beautifully on the bigger screens?

Chris (15:23): That's right. We approached apps both within Google and across the developer community to optimize their apps for larger screens, foldables and tablets alike.

I think a great example of that is in Google Photos where just the layout of when you open the Photos app takes full advantage of the larger screen so that it's really easy to browse and scroll through your photos. But then things really get interesting when you load split screen mode, which is a capability available for both the foldable as well, that as the tablet where you can load, say Gmail in another window, and then drag and drop a photo to the Gmail window to make a really quick attachment. And, and the app itself is dynamically resizing to kind of fit the window that it's in to make it easy for you to juggle multiple things.

Rachid (16:14): And then Chris, we know people like to slap on a case on a, on a tablet. I found that really beautiful to see how you sort of made a kickstand that doesn't get in the way off the dock. So I'm just wondering, how much time did you spend coming up with that idea?

Chris (16:31): This one came from our hardware design team. I don't know how long the prototype has been sitting in their labs, but it was just a really fun approach that I found to be really delightful. We use it for our nightly video call to prop the tablet on our, on our kitchen table to just have an easy way to stand it up. And we also use it at night when we're winding down. I used it to stream the Warrior's game yesterday night.

And it just really easily plops on the bed between, between my wife and I. And then another fun position is for when you're on an airplane, you can just put it on the back of an airplane seat. It's a really easy way to, to prop the screen up.

Rachid (17:11): Oh, like a coat hanger almost, I guess

Chris (17:13): Like a coat hanger. Yeah.

Rachid (17:14): That is really, that's really clever. Now when it comes to Pixel, we all expect outstanding best in class camera quality. So I also wanted to talk about the upgrades we've been making across these devices to bring camera capabilities to the next level. Justin, what's changed with Pixel 7a perhaps compared to, to 6a?

Justin Savich (17:36): Yeah, pretty much everything. I touched on this a little bit earlier, but yeah, the camera system on Pixel 7a has been completely upgraded to really bring our amazing camera experiences to even more people. You know, just to, to double click on that a little bit, some things I'm really excited about.

So we're featuring an all new upgraded 64 megapixel main camera sensor. It's in fact, the largest camera sensor that we've ever shipped in an A-series device. That's important because we think a lot about light sensitivity in the ability to capture light in these larger sensors. And light is effectively data that we use to drive these magical experiences, run all of our AI and ML models against and deliver, you know, great image quality and low light performance.

Justin Savich (18:22): Plus we have an all new 13 megapixel ultra wide camera. It's a wider field of view up to 120 degrees, so you can take great landscape shots and really great group photos. And then really cool is that we have the 13 megapixel also on the front of the device as well. And it is a big leap forward in terms of it being a wider field of view, but also for the first time supports 4K video. So all sensors on the Pixel seven products support 4k.

And, we're, we're bringing some really cool features to this camera set up. We've added long exposure, which thanks to the 8 Gigabytes of RAM, some more computationally heavy features like long exposure, we're able to enable on the A-series for the first time. And this really gives that kind of artistic or dramatic effect to objects in motion on a device or in an image. We're also, with the great help from Super Zoom, able to capture up to 8x in distance away with digital Zoom. So really excited about the camera setup for Pixel 7a.

Rachid (19:30): I think one feature we didn't touch upon yet is the Night Site that I guess transformed Pixel years ago. From what I understand, there's been a big upgrade for Night Site in 7a.

Justin Savich (19:41): Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right about that. You know, when we launched Night Sight, many years ago, I think it really redefined what users could expect from low light photography performance.

Really showcase like our, our very best approach to how we can deliver great experiences in any lighting condition for, for users. And, with Night Sight that we're making available on Pixel 7a the team's done a fantastic job, improving our models. It's now operating twice as fast in terms of capture speed, and then with twice the sharpness. So you're getting these really dynamic photos at low light situations. And you know, it just comes out really beautifully quality, like this is, not something that's, available broadly, especially at a product at this price here.

If we look at some of our competitors that have similar modes, they don't enable it at their kind of entry premium tier like we do with, with, with the A-series. And so I think that's just one of those things that really helps stand out. shots like this in the past would've been really just impossible to enable without a tripod or a DSLR camera. But it's really a testament to Tensor G2 that serves as kind of the heart of this device enabling these, these capabilities. You can even capture shots in the starry night with astrophotography, and so the pictures just come out really, really nice.

Rachid (21:07): Excellent. Now moving on to pixel fold, George, you already mentioned all the hardware changes you had to do to fit the camera in such a thin device. What does it do for the user experience?

And I guess, you know, there's maybe not a traditional front or rear camera because the front one can become the rear one and the rear one can become the front one. How do you take advantage of all of that?

George Hwang (21:29): Yeah, we got really creative and actually it was just kind of fun to think differently about how you could use a device like this.

So a couple of things that we thought through were, I think one that you just mentioned which we call rear camera selfie, powering this was Tensor G2, and we coupled that with - pun intended - the flexibility of the device where we unfolded it and used the rear cameras, which we, you know, like Justin said, have higher light sensitivity, just higher quality, and then also used the external display as the viewfinder. And so you could take a really high quality selfie of yourself using the 48 megapixel sensor, or you could even use the ultra wide camera there with the 120 degree field of view, or greater than 120 degree field of view to take, get the whole group in. So there are a lot of opportunities there.

I think I did also mention the tabletop mode where you could actually take the selfie to get the whole group in and kind of ditch the designated photographer, which always tends to be me in my family. So I'm never in any of my shots.

And then the other cool thing that we didn't talk about was another mode that we've worked on called tent mode, where you could actually kind of lay it open with the external display facing out and the camera's kind of facing to the sky - kind of like a tent. And that actually works really well with what Justin talked about around night, but the Astrophotography portion of that where you could kind of take a beautiful view of the starry sky, but have no need for a tripod.

So we really did kind of think through, you know, how could we enable new experiences, but then how could we also raise up some key core experiences that Pixel is so really known well for.

Rachid (23:14): And then the Pixel Tablet, of course, also has cameras. Chris, what has been the focus for the cameras in the Pixel tablet?

Chris (23:21): It does. So we took the opportunity to collaborate with the Pixel camera team and to focus on the use cases that are most important for tablet users, namely video calling. There's a lot of fun on device machine learning running to improve and elevate the video calling experience.

One of my favorite features is continuous framing on Google Meet. So when you're in a meet call and you activate continuous framing, the camera actually follows you, or if there are multiple subjects where, where those faces are. And it uses a couple machine learning models in parallel.

One is to track where the faces are, and then another is to actually zoom in and do a light restoring or retouching of the image especially as it's zoomed in so that you can get more details of the faces and the people that you're talking to. Another really fun one is custom backgrounds which can also be set within meet with our 360 degree backgrounds. We actually have a pretty fancy machine learning model running that's segmenting between the subject and the foreground and the background for a really accurate depiction of the subject and a solid rendering of what's in the background.

Rachid (24:33): Yeah. So I saw you using that just a week ago when we were in a briefing with reporters. So it looked like, you know, and I guess most of us during the pandemic, I guess, got sort of comfortable with having custom backgrounds.

Yeah. But then this is that if you sort of move the tablet, the background moves along, so it's much more immersive. Definitely seemed like you were on a tropical island in that case.

Chris (24:58): That's right. And I'm not going to be using this every day, but I think it's just a fun way to connect with the other person.

George Hwang (25:06): Chris is a liar. I've been on many GVCs with him so don't believe that.

Rachid (25:13): And it looks great. And, and that's all down, of course, also to Tensor G2 powering all three of these pixel devices. Now I'm wondering, could you three set the scene for us all as to what the flagship processor provides for the, for the three devices starting with you, Justin, for Pixel 7a?

Justin Savich (25:33): Yeah, I mean, I think the, the first thing just to call out is like, when we made the decision years ago to invest in our own custom SOC, it was really with the intent to showcase the latest and greatest of Google's cutting edge AI and ML research.

We have this tremendous bench of talented engineers and researchers and scientists. And we really wanted to bring the helpfulness of Google to the forefront. And, when we ship these products, we're shipping Google andTensor G2 is the latest iteration of our in-house custom silicon. And it really does showcase all these great capabilities. And I think that translates in, obviously photography where we have experiences like Photo Unblur, Super Res Zoom, Night Sight and so forth.

Justin Savich (26:20): But it also translates across, all the helpful speech related features. Those like Live Translate… crystal Clear Calling, which helps to drown out background noise and the caller that you're on the other line with so you can hear them more clearly.

Of course there's optimizations in battery and system health that are delivered through Tensor but just so much that that comes off this chipset and the fact that all three of these products share that same processor means we're really able to leverage and platform these experiences and our effort to put forth our very best product and best interpretations of Google's helpfulness.

Rachid (27:04): George, when it comes to Tensor G2, what, what's kind of like the superpower it delivers in the world of Foldables?

George Hwang (27:11): Yeah, I think Justin talked about generally the baseline for all of us, and investing on this on, across all these devices kind of brings all that greatness, but particularly for the Pixel Fold, one of the key use cases is around productivity and multitasking.

And as you run multiple apps, you know, you have multiple windows and things like that. It can get pretty airy on the processor, but, Tensor G2 has been able to really handle that in stride and help kind of do everything from the split screening that Chris was talking about to the drag and drop. So it's been really great for that.

Additionally, some of the things that I've called out from the camera particular rear camera selfie or the Astrophotography is all powered by Tensor G2. So it really does help us make the device stand out.

Rachid (27:56): Great. And then Chris, of course, we talked about the backgrounds in video calling, but surely for the Pixel tablet there are more benefits of having Tensor G2 in there.

Chris (28:07): Yeah, that's a fun feature to use every once in a while. But I would say it's not a feature per se, but just to echo Justin's sentiment, the fact that this is part of a broader development effort and we are building a single platform with Tensor G2 to support a number of devices and form factors is really meaningful.

That means users get a really consistent experience across Fold. 7a and Pixel Tablet in terms of interface, in terms of performance, in terms of capabilities, and that's something that someone is going to enjoy more and more over time as they continue using their Pixel devices.

As it pertains to tablets in particular, I would say performance is a real win. One of the concerns that we've heard in this space is that there isn't necessarily an Android tablet out there that kind of hits that sweet spot in terms of performance but also is competitive in terms of pricing. And we feel like we've really met that and Tensor G2 has contributed greatly so that your games have really responsive gameplay. Your videos stream smoothly and it's really easy to multitask and juggle different apps.

Rachid (29:21): You guys mentioned the single platform for these three devices. Does that also mean that they all have similar update ability when it comes to software and security?

Justin Savich (29:32): Yeah, that, that's right. So with Tensor G2 we stand committed for offering three years of OS releases with our devices and five years of security updates. The truism of Pixel devices is that the devices get better over time with feature drops. And so, we're all really excited with our respective products - that the product that a customer gets on day one, gets better, more secure, more performant in time instead of degrading like those offered by our competitors.

Rachid (30:06): And with that, before we close each episode, we'd like to ask our guests to share a top tip of their, so I'm sure our listeners are going to run out and, and get one of these three devices, or maybe two or all three. Why not? And I'm just wondering, you know, from the creators of those devices, what would you say is the first thing that they should try out with the, the, the things you created, you worked on? Chris, maybe we can start with you with the tablet.

Chris (30:32): It's definitely the case. I've worked on many, many hardware products over the past several years, and my wife is, I think, one of my toughest critics, right? And most of the products are like, oh, this is pretty cool, or this is, this is pretty enjoyable. But the case she cannot stop raving about as being just one of the most clever things that we've designed and innovated on. And it's really exciting. She shares it with her friends and family whenever she can. And just excited to kind of bring that level of flexibility to people with the tablet.

Rachid (31:08): Amazing. That's a great top tip. Get the case. Great idea, George. For people perhaps getting their first foldable and selecting the Pixel Fold, excellent choice. Of course. What's the first thing they should try when they get it?

George Hwang (31:21): I think it's multitasking. It's something I use each and every day. Pro tip for us all who are in, who use GVC all the time, you can use it split screen, have it on top, and then see what the warrior score is on the bottom, or, you know, just keep yourself in the moment. So don't tell my manager, but yeah,

Rachid (31:45): Yes, let's hope the manager isn't listening or maybe they're doing the same. Who knows. Who knows. And Justin, finally, to close up with you, Pixel 7a, let's say I got that beautiful Coral one from the Google store. I unpack it and I love the color, but then I turn it on. What's the first thing I'm going to do? What's your top tip?

Justin Savich (32:01): You know, there's so much to like, with the device. The photography experience is obviously going to be fantastic, like any of the other Pixel devices. I guess maybe one pro tip to highlight so we enabled 90 Hertz on this device. It does come default turned off out of the box. So, if you really want a more performant experience, scrolling, anything with touch animations, engaging with the the product, go into settings under display and then and flip on smooth display and, and that'll enable you to have this smart feature which allows you to toggle between 60 and 90 hertz. You'll be able to benefit from having that feature enabled.

Rachid (33:01): Amazing. Those are three great tips, gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining us today, and I hope we can get you back all three of you, maybe even separately, so we can deep dive some more into the products you've been working on. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Justin Savich (33:16): Thanks so much, Rachid.

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  1. See g.co/pixel/astrophotography for details.