According to Google, the Pixel 8 Pro gives you “AI in your hand”, packaged up in a flagship smartphone that has a tight focus on the goals it wants to achieve. Given that, why has Google made the problematic decision to spend resources on adding a thermometer?
I ask because the Pixel team has been focused on bringing Google’s vision of a smartphone to market. While the original Nexus devices were more about providing a reference model for developers to address a “vanilla Android” experience, the Pixel devices have been about demonstrating excellence and pushing the envelope on what a smartphone can do.
During last week’s “Made By Google” launch event, Rick Osterloh and his team reiterated time and time again that the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro represented smartphones that put Artificial Intelligence to the foreground and would integrate AI into someone’s daily life.
You can see that throughout the package. Cutting-edge photo editing tools have been reduced to little more than circling the object you want removed. tell us how much blurring you want removed, and a CSI-inspired “Zoom And Enhance” will be available before the end of the year.
Elsewhere in the software, you have AI helping improve the transcription service in the Sound Recorder app, correcting grammar in short messages and texts, faster language translation services, and using the Google Bard project to create your own AI assistant.
And at the very heart of the hardware, you have the Tensor G3 chipset. Eschewing the popular Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip options, Google designed its chipset to accommodate its future vision; the AI-infused vision is made easier to implement because of the design decisions in the Tensor G3.
Everything pulls in the same direction.
Except for the thermometer sensor. Why is that even here? It’s not something that is a vital part of Google’s AI strategy; it’s not a sensor that has been in high demand on other handsets; in fact, you’d have to make some pretty specific searches to find another phone on sale in the High Street with a similar sensor.
The implementation is weak. It’s a standalone app that offers a single function – measure an object’s temperature. In practice, it is erratic, with the temperature readout apparently dependent on distance from the thing. Which distance is reliable? Is it the same for different materials? Can I tell the difference between cast iron, matte metal, and shiny metal? And shouldn’t surface temperature be the same no matter the material?
The obvious, and perhaps the only use that makes sense in situ, is taking your body’s temperature. Yet, to do that in the US, Google needs the Pixel 8 Pro to be registered as a medical device (and that suggests each territory may need legal clearance to be a medical device). Given that the Pixel 8 Pro’s design was likely locked in around 2020 and 2021, spotting a rise in body temperature was uppermost in people’s minds.
Even if that lines up, clearance is given, and you can start taking your temperature, the question of “why” remains. This addition has come out of relatively nowhere.
Until the Pixel 8 Pro, Google has shown discipline to avoid similar diversions in the spec sheet. When you have software and hardware all pulling in a single direction, spending time and resources on what feels little more than a toy attached to your $1000 vision of the future is a visible problem.
If Google truly believed that every phone in the world should have a thermometer, then it would have been implemented long before now. So why is it here?
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