Despite all those rumors that Google would put an end to its Nexus line, Mountain View wanted to prove us wrong and started working on the Nexus 8 tablet with HTC, and on the Nexus 6 smartphone with Motorola.
Google’s David Burake pointed out at this year’s I/O conference that the Nexus line is anything but dead. Leaks of specs and renders of the HTC Nexus 8 kind of established that, and now we’re hearing that the search giant is working on the next Nexus smartphone with Motorola’s help.
The previous two Nexus phones were made by LG, and it would’ve been anyone’s guess that the next one, if any, would also be made by this South Korean company. Still, Google decided that a bit of diversification wouldn’t hurt, and went for HTC and Motorola instead. Besides, LG’s planned Nexus was first canceled, and at a later point denied entirely.
It’s a bit weird that Google is only using Motorola now for a Nexus product, as the Mountain View company has owned the smartphone manufacturer for a few years now. Lenovo bought most of Motorola from them, but Google kept the licenses and quite a few patents. After all, Project Ara is a Mountain View product that was made by Motorola Mobility, a division that was kept as part of the deal.
About the next Nexus phone not much is known, actually. Rumor has it that it will be called Shamu, and this might as well be true, as Google made of habit of naming some of its products after sea creatures. Other than that, the diagonal is yet another detail that circulated. It seems that Google stopped at 5.9 inches, thus stepping in phablet territory. Some people hoped that the next Nexus would range between 4.7 and 5 inches in diagonal, and think that at 5.9 Nexus 6 might be a bit difficult to handle.
Motorola is said to include a fingerprint sensor in the next Nexus phone, sign that this technology is becoming more and more popular. One thing I wish is that this sensor is not as easy to hack as the iPhone 5S’ or the Galaxy S5’s. This way, Google could teach the other smartphone manufacturers an important lesson about the consumer’s safety.
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