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Be together, not the same: Google’s phone picker helps you find the right phone for you

 

Around the time of the launch of the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, Google revamped its marketing for Android with the new tagline “Be together. Not the same,” uploading to YouTube a handful of heart-tugging videos featuring a slew of different animal pairs playing together and being friends. These ads were meant as a real-world analogous to how Google sees its Android operating system today, in 2015: one operating system that can power a bevy of different devices in different environments and use-cases. Not just phones with different screen sizes but also watches, TVs, and cars, to name the primary ones. With so much choice, Google has launched a new website which, based on user input, helps narrow down which phones might be right for different people.

The website is pretty simple, asking you for the three main tasks you expect to use your new phone for as well as how much time in any given day you expect to be using your phone for said task. It may also ask some additional questions based on your input – when I chose “Listening to music” as one of the tasks I’d use my new phone for, it asked through which method (i.e. headphones, Bluetooth speakers) I expect to listen most often.

At the end it finishes by asking which carrier you’ll be buying the phone on (you can choose to skip this), and then presents you with a collection of smartphones it thinks you’ll like along with options to narrow down your choices even further by factors like price and screen size. The top three choices it found for me were the LG G4, Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and Samsung Galaxy S6/S6 Edge.

Not anything groundbreaking here, but it definitely helps define the line between Android and its manufacturing partners. I think we all remember the days when people referred to Android simply as “Droid” – a simply misconception based on the popularity of the first solid Android-powered line of smartphones. Strategies like this make it clear that Android is separate from the devices themselves.

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