It's a Sphere! The Inside Story of Nexus Q, Google's Music Hardware Gamble (2024)

SAN FRANCISCO – Sharing music with friends used to be intimate, even messy. We visited each other’s homes with stacks of records, and plundered album sleeves until vinyl littered the floor. Everyone negotiated song choices in real time, and when consensus proved impossible, DJ duties fell to whomever reached the turntable first.

Nexus Q: Top-Line Features- Google’s first fully branded, fully house-engineered hardware.

• Sucks down music from the cloud, shoots it directly to speakers and A/V receivers.
• Social sharing mode allows anyone to control playlists with Machiavellian abandon.
• Multiple units can be wirelessly daisy-chained for multi-room playback.
• Striking industrial design provokes curiosity, intrigue, WTF.
• Given away free to all Google I/O attendees. Available for pre-order today for $300 (U.S. only). Starts shipping in July.

Sometimes this led to the 40,000th playback of Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” And sometimes you had to listen to that weird friend-of-a-friend’s freakbeat sitar jam. “It’s number one in Berlin!” he’d assure you, as if this flimsy bit of context could convert your musical faith.

Now Google wants to update this conversation-based music discovery system for the digital age. At its I/O keynote Wednesday, the company unveiled Nexus Q, a sleek streaming-media sphere that’s 4.6 inches in diameter and looks like pop art. Nearly devoid of outward-facing controls, Nexus Q is a puzzle – a satin-coated curio that begs to be touched and examined. But when you gaze into this mysterious black ball that crackles with light, you don’t see the future but rather blasts from the past: a return to speaker-driven audio, along with all the real-time social sharing that vinyl once inspired.

Nexus Q, which begins shipping in July for $300, grants fully provisioned DJ rights to anyone carrying an Android device within Wi-Fi range.

“The sphere is a zero primitive form.” – Chris Jones, Google“Everyone has the same playlist rights,” says Joe Britt, Google’s engineering director. “We didn't want to build in artificial limits that the owner of Nexus Q could enforce. You can’t control how many songs someone can add, or what permissions one person has over another. It’s a social, shared experience, and you and I have to actually interact if there’s disagreement about the song list.”

Once your Android phone or tablet is connected to Nexus Q, you can delete someone else’s favorite song – even your host’s favorite song – from the community playlist (naturally, it’s called a queue). You can also bump your personal favorite track to the top of the queue, rearrange the order of the queue, and raise and lower volume.

__It’s Not an Entertainment Gadget, It’s Google’s Bid to Control the Future by Fred Vogelstein__Joe Britt hands me his latest creation, a black ball with glittering LED lights around the middle, and implores me to examine it. He wants me to feel how solid and heavy the device is - about two pounds - to experience the smooth operation of its moving parts, and to see the care used in laying out its internal electronics. It is a very analog moment, akin to how I felt buying my first audio receiver. Back then there were three tests: How did the music sound? How did the knobs feel when you turned them? How cool did it look in the store?

Britt wants me to respond this way. In our two hours together, with his partner Matt Hershenson, they bring up the intersection of technology and liberal arts - as Apple’s Steve Jobs liked to call it - half a dozen times. Once, to make his point, Britt reminds me of record parties, those 1970s gatherings where teenagers lugged their music to friends' houses in milk crates.

But I am not at Apple. I'm at Google, in a cramped electronics lab on the second floor of Building 44. Read More

This unique sharing scheme directly ties into Google’s cloud. Instead of running content off local storage (the device includes none whatsoever), Nexus Q uses Wi-Fi to pull down audio tracks from the ether of Google Music. Each song buffers in a smidgen of built-in memory, then pipes directly to standalone speakers or the A/V receiver of a home entertainment system. This system allows anyone with a Google Music collection to instantaneously contribute to, and manipulate, the queue. You can also connect Nexus Q to a TV and use it as a playback vehicle for YouTube and videos rented from Google Movies.

The Q is Google’s first fully branded hardware product, and it was developed completely in-house by a team of some 100 detail-obsessed employees. An early, rhomboid-shaped version made a brief appearance at last year’s I/O conference under the name Project Tungsten, but now the concept is an actual product (you can pre-order today for a July delivery) in full Nexus-branded regalia. And it throbs with a polish and sophistication that’s missing from much of today’s consumer electronics.

That’s good news for Google, as Nexus Q is a critical first step if the company is to be taken seriously as a hardware manufacturer after its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Even if consumers don’t buy into the lofty social goals of this streaming media sphere (we have to abandon the term “box” entirely), engineering and industrial design nerds should still be impressed.

Just like Microsoft recently demonstrated with its Surface tablet, Google understands that no-excuses hardware execution is paramount in this age of Retina display iPads and otherworldly MacBook Pros. Google decided to source almost all of its parts from U.S. suppliers, and is even bucking convention by manufacturing Nexus Q in America. This allows the company’s engineers to visit any link in their manufacturing chain at a moment’s notice.

“Being able to have every engineer go to the factory if needed is incredibly valuable,” says Matt Hershenson, director of hardware. “And they don’t have to get on a plane to do that.”

For all its polish, though, Nexus Q still faces problems. Its current feature set is limited: At launch, the hardware only works with three software services – the Music, Movies and YouTube apps built into Android Jelly Bean (older OS versions will be updated to support Nexus Q when the product ships in July). This locks users into Google’s cloud platform, and ignores the special talents of apps like Rdio and Spotify, which provide music discovery tools fully rooted in modern social media.

And with its anarchic approach to playlist creation, Google is gambling on an unproven formula. Do home owners really want visitors messing with their stereo systems? In fact, the answer may not matter that much: The platform doesn’t support iOS, Windows Phone or any desktop OS, so anyone who wants to exert queue control will have to do so on an Android device – another factor that’s bound to limit consumer interest.

The referendum on Google’s maiden hardware effort will be decided in due time. (We’ll have our full review online this week.) For now, its success or failure notwithstanding, let’s investigate exactly how Nexus Q works, and how this curious black orb that’s sometimes called “phantasm” by various Googlers first took shape.

Spherical Drama in a High-Tech Still-Life

The Nexus Q boasts only two physical controls, and even these are difficult to make out at first glance. There’s a volume control described by the sphere’s rotating cap, and a mute function that’s triggered by a capacitive touch sensor – just tap the dome to mute on and off.

The lack of obvious controls compels you to pick up the Q, if only to determine what the hell it is. When you do, you’ll immediately notice its density and heft. This is not a flimsy piece of disposable sino-ware. The lower hemisphere of the Q is a heavy, die-cast metal base that functions as a heat-sink and prevents the ball from tipping over when a bunch of cables are plugged in.

And make no mistake, a fully appointed Q will be positively bristling with cables. The back of the device sports banana jacks for direct speaker connections, a Toslink/optical port for connection to a home entertainment system, an HDMI port for connecting an HDTV, and even a MicroUSB port for “future accessories and hackability.”

All this wiring plus a power cable makes for a busy back panel, but when your Nexus Q sits on a bookshelf in a high-tech still life, you focus on raw mystery, not a nest of rubbery snakes. The sphere is bisected by a 1-millimeter gap through which shines the carefully diffused light of 32 multi-color LEDs. The LEDs pulsate to the beat and rhythm of the music, and can be set to five different themes: spectrum (full RGB), warm (summer colors), cool (winter colors), blue (an homage to Android’s color theme), and smoke (a dialed-down visualization for when you want to minimize distractions).

Between Nexus Q’s unusual geometry, an almost complete lack of branding (the name Nexus appears on the back), and the clever lighting theatrics, the industrial design conspires to strike a dramatic pose. “We didn’t want it to be yet another puck that you hide behind a TV,” says Britt.

Nonetheless, as is the case with all audio hardware, sound quality and usability ultimately trump aesthetics, and in this area Google thinks Nexus Q stands up with the best. Inside the sphere, there’s not a lot of processing hardware – the internal components mirror those of a Galaxy Nexus smartphone – but Google is genuinely proud of the quality of its amp. “It’s got a 25-watt, class D amplifier, and we've gone to great lengths to make sure it's a great,” says Hershenson.

“The engineer who designed the amp is really into tube amps. He’s an amplifier aficionado,” adds Britt. “I think a lot of people are going to be surprised by how good it sounds when you pair it with a decent set of speakers.” (Google will eventually sell accompanying speakers and cabling on the Nexus section of its Play storefront.)

It’s reasonable to think that consumers who’ve committed themselves to Team Android and Google Play might embrace the device, if only because it provides a convenient interface for all the digital media they suck down from the cloud. You can store up to 20,000 music tracks in Google Music for free, and Nexus Q will play them back as MP3 files at up to 320 kbps. This isn’t Neil Young-approved audiophile quality, but it’s higher-resolution audio than most people bother to improve upon. All playback is managed directly within Android apps, so creating playlists and managing queue order is a familiar, touch-powered affair.

Multiple Nexus Qs can be networked over Wi-Fi in a single house or apartment, each playing the same song at the same time. To this extent, Nexus Q becomes a competitor to multi-room, wireless media streamers, including Sonos and Apple AirPlay set-ups. But where these competing systems depend on active streaming from your mobile device – depleting its battery in the process – the Q processes brief instructions issued by your handset or tablet, and streams all digital content on its own.

It’s a simple system to set up and use. And this isn’t just the case with music. As a vehicle for finding and watching YouTube videos on a big-screen TV, Nexus Q makes Google TV hardware remotes look even more confusing than they already are.

Managing Chaos Within the Queue

YouTube aside, Nexus Q’s primary mission is to bring music back to open-air environments. Google believes that iPods, smartphones and their earbud tethers can be too isolating. They deny us a valuable listening experience that Nexus Q returns to us.

“When you listen to music out loud in a room,” says Britt, “you hear things that you otherwise wouldn’t hear – because you’re either wearing headphones and are doing something else, or because low frequencies aren’t being reproduced by the headphones. There’s a generation of people who’ve grown up with white earbuds, and exposing them to something else is a powerful thing.”

There’s no doubt that Nexus Q is easy to use, and provides a ready vehicle for listening to Google Music in ambient spaces, along with all the reverb and spatial presence that four-cornered rooms provide. Still, Google is terribly excited about Nexus Q as a social-sharing platform. Britt says it’s the hardware’s killer feature. But it all sounds a bit precious, doesn’t it? And does the community queue really survive the scrutiny of real-world use?

Google promises the social queuing functions have been tested by multiple guinea pigs in group situations, and that basic, human rules of order quickly sort out any confusion begat by Nexus Q’s liberal privileging. In fact, for the past few months, company employees have been dogfooding the sharing features during office parties, and even Googlers, so famous for their independent streaks and hacking appetites, have (reportedly) found harmony in the queue.

“What we see happen is that when you first come in, you really want to get your music in there. There’s a song you really want to hear, so you set it to play,” says Chris McKillop of Google’s Android@Home team. “But soon everyone gets in the groove of not interrupting, and letting songs finish, because they want their songs to finish too. People pick up their phones to see what’s playing – ‘Hey, that song makes me think of this song’ – and then they add their song in. There are fluctuations at the beginning, but then it sort of levels down.”

The queuing system also includes two critical failsafe elements: First, guest privileges can be turned off entirely (though they can't be granted on a case-by-case basis). Second, every song added to the queue is marked with the track owner’s avatar. So, while you might be able to crash a house party and mess with the queue while holed up in some random bathroom – giggling like a madman while you play that freakbeat sitar track – your identity will always be exposed.

Also important to note: The queue is a transient song list, and not an actual playlist. When you add a song to the queue, the Nexus Q owner can listen to the track for 24 hours, even after you’ve left. It’s a kick-ass feature that reinforces the hardware as a sharing platform, but no actual files are added to the device (nor could they be, what with the lack of local storage). By the same token, Nexus Q isn’t a gateway to all your friends’ music collections or private playlists – you can only see the songs that have been added to the queue, not everything a visitor has stored in the cloud.

Rented movies behave a little differently. Most Google Play video rentals are already saddled with a 24-hour lifespan that begins ticking as soon as you hit play. So if you begin watching a movie at your house, and want to share it with a friend at his house via the Q, you need to respect the original 24-hour window.

In the lead-up to Wednesday's announcement, Wired didn't get a chance to test Nexus Q’s social-sharing schtick in anything approaching a real-world party environment. It’s entirely possible that Google’s trademark feature will receive a chorus of crickets once the hardware hits retail. But we did spend considerable time with Nexus Q’s engineering, design and manufacturing teams, and their passion and sophistication is unmistakable. The hardware was developed with loving care, and speaks to a bright future for Google house design.

Google Welcomes a Trio of Aesthetes to Nerd HQ

In a company overwhelmed by software engineering nerds, Google’s industrial design team is a teeny-tiny pocket of aestheticism and artistic soul. There are only three team leaders, but their bona fides compensate for the lack of bench depth.

Two-thirds of the team, Mike Simonian and Maaike Evers, are husband and wife. In 2004, Simonian led the industrial design of the Xbox 360, and in 2007 the duo created the design for the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1. Before joining Google on a formal basis for the Nexus Q project, the couple ran their own full-time studio, Mike & Maaike, designing everything from furniture to an experimental skateboard.

Simonian and Evers speak at a quiet volume, just like their portfolio aesthetic. Nothing about this couple is overstated or horsey. Simonian’s wardrobe is smart and current, but the sartorial equivalent of a blank canvas. Evers wears geometric jewelry of her own design, but only her flair for red shoes suggests any degree of real flamboyance.

The team is rounded out by Chris Jones, the lead industrial designer for Google’s Android group, and a 14-year veteran of consumer electronics hardware design. Jones is more socially forward, and speaks in a Nottinghamshire accent that immediately projects design house credibility, whether he likes it or not. This is a bit of a crass analogy, but when you first meet the guy – and hear his voice, and observe his passion – you immediately get the feeling that if Google can maintain its hardware momentum, Jones will become the company’s own Jony Ive.

Jones describes the emerging Nexus design language – a voice based on elemental shapes and minimal hardware controls – in a lexicon that’s much more Surface or Metropolis than Sound+Vision magazine. And like others on the Nexus Q project, Jones is smitten with the idea that we’ve entered a “third wave” of consumer electronics. Wave one was described by simple hardware (think analog record player). Wave two added a software brain to the package (think iPod). And now the third wave integrates the cloud.

“The sphere is a zero primitive form,” Jones says. “It transcends into this third wave of electronics where the interface, Android, is on another device. So now the actual object doesn’t have the burden of direct manipulation. It can have any presence and gesture within the room, and this encourages you to interact with it.”

Presence. Drama. Curious physicality. Everyone on the Nexus Q project was looking for an industrial design that would provoke intense interest if you saw the hardware from 20 feet away. An early version of the Q took the form of a lopsided box, a rhomboid. This was the Tungsten Project prototype that Britt demoed on stage at last year’s Google I/O. “It was a dangerous form,” says Britt. “It had two really sharp points, but it looked really cool.”

The rhomboid was also a tad too techy-looking. And it didn’t immediately evoke allusions to Google’s cloud. Flash forward about one year, and now we have the sphere, “a simple shape that can be described by a single number – its diameter,” says Simonian.

This softer geometry better fit with the evolution of the Tungsten Project. “It makes more sense that it’s spherical,” Simonian says. “It's pointing up at the cloud because it integrates with cloud services. It's pointing out to people all around, because it's about bringing people together.”

As for the omission of traditional interface controls, Evers says this was all but guaranteed. “We always knew we wanted to take a big step away from interactive buttons,” she says. “We wanted to hide functionality into the object itself – make it more of a mysterious product so that you would be curious about it, and what it does, and how you interact with it.”

Simonian chimes in: “We’re looking at products in terms of the spaces they occupy. And that’s why we’re going with an elemental approach to industrial design. It takes a lot of restraint to use a basic shape like a sphere, but we’re trying to get away from what we call ‘electronics store aesthetics.’”

For all its outward facing charms, Nexus Q is just as detail-oriented inside. An early version of the rotating volume control used plastic bearings, but they didn’t provide enough inertial drag – the dome spun just a bit too easily. So the design team spec’d metal bearings instead. The hardware also includes a micro-controller that fires up the LEDs the moment Nexus Q is powered on. Without this little addition, you would have to wait for a system boot to see the orb come alive.

The design team also tweaked the platform’s banana jacks, re-imagining an audio hardware standard first introduced in 1924. “We couldn’t find any that looked good,” says Evers. “They’re all gold and gaudy, with terrible detailing. So we had to do a custom one to make it look right.”

And even the internal circuit boards – once a hidden element, but now very public in this age of hardware teardowns – were tweaked for proper presentation: “We decided they should be blue,” says Jones. “It relates to the saturated color of the Android OS. The soul of the device is Android, so it was apt to relate back to the touch points of the Android platform.”

Jones took the lead on brand I.D., and this too is highly finessed. In fact, the Nexus Q’s retail packaging – sort of an unfurling egg carton dressed up in a belly band – is much more up-market than what we’ve been seeing from Google’s smartphone and tablet partners. The message is clear: Google is now a hardware company. It’s going to own product development from initial design drawings to final packaging, and corners will not be cut.

Made in America, But Will Americans Buy It?

Nexus Q’s genesis story begins right at the top with Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Android. At Google I/O in May 2011, Rubin’s team introduced Project Tungsten (the proto-Q) as part of the Android@Home initiative, a framework to use the mobile OS to control household electronics. Then in November 2011, Google launched Google Music, its cloud-based sales and storage platform. Rubin had always planned to merge Android@Home and Music, says Britt.

“This was our direction from Andy,” says Britt. “Home media devices were identified as an appropriate entry point for [Android@Home] because anybody can buy one of these things, take it home, and start enjoying it. But it was really the genesis of Google Music where we saw the opportunity to build something that would tie in.”

Sounds reasonable enough, but a stationary home audio device seems quite tangential for an Android platform so strongly associated with mobility. If you’re going to declare yourself a hardware company, why not go for the gusto and release a fully Google-branded smartphone or tablet?

Britt and Hershenson could only provide circ*mspect answers.

“I think we’re really well served by the partnerships we have with phone and tablet makers,” Hershenson says. “They have profound expertise, and we’ve had great experiences with them, partnering with them to build lead devices. But [Nexus Q] is in a slightly different category, and we had strong convictions about the design direction, and how we wanted to put it together.”

Strong convictions, indeed. Everyone involved with the creation of Nexus Q exudes intense pride-of-ownership, and when you follow Hershenson around Google’s hardware facilities in Mountain View, he becomes a geeky craftsmen who wants to show off his shop tools. There’s a 3-D printing lab where Google’s engineers output high-precision prototype parts. There’s an electrical engineering lab where Googlers can R&D a product’s digital guts. And there’s also a big thermal testing chamber to make sure devices like Nexus Q can withstand the abuse of intense temperature fluctuations over time.

Hershenson and Britt tend to fawn over Nexus Q like helicopter parents, so perhaps it’s natural that almost all supply chain partners (even the Nexus Q factory itself) are located in the United States, just a car ride or relatively short plane trip away. (Google was emphatic that Wired not reveal the location of the factory).

“When you’re building stuff in China, there can be a multi-week latency between when a product is produced until when you’re actually able to evaluate it,” says Britt. “Unless you’ve got somebody on the ground, constantly monitoring every aspect, it’s really hard to guarantee quality. You’re trusting someone 6,000 miles away.”

And for Google, the decision to manufacture locally wasn’t just about quality assurance. The company also had a very aggressive launch schedule, so it needed as much flexibility as possible in the production line. “We have a manufacturing run where units made in the afternoon end up in the homes of trial users that night. For the execution we wanted to achieve, it was a big enabler to build locally,” Britt says.

If we’re grading only on hardware execution, Nexus Q is full of win. It sounds great, looks great, provokes conversation, and is easy to use. The hardware would seem to make good on all its promises – but is what it promises really enough for a whopping $300?

Nexus Q offers no support for iOS and Windows Phone. This alone makes the device a non-starter for vast swaths of the tech-curious public. Nexus Q also depends 100 percent on Google Play cloud services – so some might argue the device is nothing more than Google’s craven attempt to recruit users into its for-profit ecosystem (if only forgetting for a moment that Google Music allows you to save up to 20,000 tracks for free).

But Google’s biggest problem might be its core philosophy on how music should be shared among friends in 2012. Nexus Q argues that we should share while listening to the exact same song in the exact same room. It wants to pull us kicking and screaming into real-time conversations about what we’re hearing. It wants us to explore the nuanced free-associations that only face-to-face dialogue provides.

However, two extremely popular apps – Rdio and Spotify – have rewritten the rules of music-sharing for the age of social media. They enjoy immense public support, but no support from Nexus Q.

Both apps are gateways to vast, deep, commercial music catalogs in the cloud. They let you stream current radio hits, yesterday’s classics, and a surprising amount of music from the fringes. Yes, they demand modest subscription fees if you want a premium, mobile app experience. And, no, they don’t offer every artist, album or track you may want to hear. Each service’s sound quality fails the muster of hardcore audiophiles, but both Rdio and Spotify are loaded with sharing tools that sing in harmony with the conventions of modern social media.

You can use these apps to spy on the playlists of friends. You can follow other users whose tastes jibe with yours. You can share track suggestions via email, Twitter and Facebook. This is how legions of social-media-aware users share music today, and these people – perhaps the world’s most influential tastemakers – may shrug away Nexus Q as an anachronism.

Joe Britt disagrees.

“There are of lots of different ways people interact socially, and some have become deprecated over time,” Britt says. “But I’m not sure if that’s because they’re less interesting or less valuable, or because new modes of communication and entertainment have made people forget about the value associated with them. Nexus Q is revival of something that used to be very commonplace, but it’s something humans still react very positively to.”

Hershenson drops in for back-up: “When you think about a shared experience, it’s not necessarily me sending you an email saying, ‘This is a good song.’ It’s a richer experience for me to play that song for you. You can talk about, ‘This is a cool part. Here’s the bridge. This is what this song reminds me of.’ It’s just much more enjoyable.”

Throughout reporting this story, Britt repeated that Nexus Q in its current state is just the first iteration of an evolving product. And he teased the likelihood of compelling software updates: “It’s another device running Android, and that’s an extensible platform, so you can imagine a number of different directions that it can take in the future.”

And so we wait. And we listen. Nexus Q may not be the perfect streaming audio sphere, but it’s a fascinating first step in Google’s bid to become a hardware company. And it’s sure to get people talking.

Factory photos: Ariel Zambelich/Wired