Hugo Barra talks about Nexus 7 in interview

Android Director of Product Management Hugo Barra appeared for the first time on stage at the Honeycomb event last year. Back then, I remember thinking he didn’t do a very good job presenting Honeycomb, but I think it was also the whole environment that didn’t make sense and put him in a bad light. It looked a lot less professional than any Google I/O event, and it seemed like they just quickly rented a room to show Honeycomb, which wouldn’t be the only rushed thing they did in relation to Android 4.0. However, at this year’s Google I/O event I thought Barra did a very good job presenting Jelly Bean, and he did it in a very confident manner.

Of course, giving speeches is not his main job at Google. His job is to manage most of the Android teams, and make sure Android as a whole turns out to be a good product. But if he’s going to be the one presenting the new version of Android every time, then I’m glad he can do a good job with that, as well. Presenting a product can be almost as important as building it, and we’ve learned that from Steve Jobs’s keynotes, where he could make almost any small thing or feature sound like a big deal and get everyone hyped about it.

Wired managed to take an interview with Barra, and ask him more details about Nexus 7.

Nexus 7

Barra thinks that the Nexus 7 is the most powerful 7-inch tablet on the market by leaps and bounds, not just through its no-compromise hardware, which in many ways is as good as a $500 tablet, but also through its Jelly Bean OS, for which Google adopted a more phone-like UI. Apparently people want to use such a device mostly in portrait mode and he thinks this is the direction the industry needs to take for 7-inch tablets.

When asked about a possible 10-inch tablet, his answer was a bit unsatisfactory, as he said that they will take it one step at a time. And they’ll first wait and see what their partners do with the 10-inch form factor. That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t release a Nexus 10 tablet this fall, especially if Android 5.0 is meant to improve the UI for 10-inch tablets some more. However, those changes are not ready now, so between now and then Android device manufacturers will have to figure out for themselves how they can modify the more phone-like Jelly Bean to work well on a 10-inch device. 

from androidauthority