// 9TO5GOOGLE — MOBILE & WEB
Live from New York, it’s another awkward Pixel keynote
Good morning. What a day yesterday — we had a huge Google hardware event, a total solar eclipse, a truly terrible AI album, and a couple of powerful, cheap AI models released that are sure to make Google sweat. Oh, and we’ve made it to 10 issues!
As a reminder, Inbox is the tech newsletter you should be able to read in around 95 seconds. We cover the most important 9to5Google stories from the last couple of days along with a few highlights from around the web. We publish every Tuesday and Thursday, and if you like what you read, please subscribe.
Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column.
For the second year in a row, Google opted to announce its new Pixel products publicly at a star-studded New York event hosted by a comedian. But this year’s version, like the product lineup itself, was a modest year-over-year upgrade, replacing the interminable Jimmy Fallon with the much more down to earth and likable Trevor Noah.
What didn’t change was the overt attempt to convert the Pixel brand into something it’s struggled to become over its 10-year history: a mainstream success. Rick Osterloh once again sat on a couch talking to the host and once again spoke effusively of “asking[ing] more from your phone,” with Gemini at the center of the experience.
“This is a huge change in how we use phones and watches every day right now. And we’re also using Gemini to reimagine devices that people have taken for granted for years, things like laptops, smart speakers, TVs and in cars.”
In a lot of ways, though, the spectacle was also a very typical tech keynote. Product managers from Google’s various hardware and software teams took turns reading from a teleprompter, mostly relying on features and specs to carry the messages that celebrities and professional athletes tried, with varying degrees of success, to augment. Google mainstays like Alex Cooper and Steph Curry were joined by newcomers Chari Hawkins, JuJu Watkins, Peggy Gou, PinkPantheress, and others.
To Google’s credit, while there were a few moments of cringe, it was a far smoother, funnier, and more entertaining show than last year’s near-disaster. Trevor Noah knew when to stick to the script and when to toss an improvised quip that, thanks to his decades as a stand-up comic, mostly landed with the audience.
But while the event’s ambitions were as lofty as Rick’s promises to “push the state-of-the-art forward in software and AI and hardware,” it remains to be seen whether the products themselves can possibly live up to those high expectations and, more importantly, whether an evening New York event will make regular people finally sit up and take notice.
Yesterday was busy: we published over 25 articles in the Made by Google 2026 canon, but in case you missed them I want to highlight some of the most important: