Boring Google’s boring Pixel looks really, really boring

My opinion: What’s worse than being boring? Is it being boring while also managing to presumptuously pretend to be something you’re not? In that case, Google takes the lead in the super-boring stake with its decision to release a non-iPhone that looks so very like an iPhone (speaking as a man in the street).

This seems incredibly rich given that at least some of the people who work in the over-active dark ops Google/Samsung social media rebuttals departments spent so much time before the incredibly successful iPhone 7 launch complaining that Apple’s new smartphone was boring.

The trouble with Google is it believes people are stupid. It truly thinks that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes true. People are not stupid, and day-by-day people are seeing through these lies. That’s why the iPhone 7 is setting new sales records.

Bring on, Google Pixel.

Google’s new homemade Android phone is meant to be the mother of all Android phones. That’s because it’s so much like an iPhone. It looks like one, runs an OS that’s similar to one, and will even get security updates on a regular basis – an innovation you don’t generally get on Android as the business model used across that platform is inherently wasteful.

Wasteful? Yes. Inherently. Who is collecting and recycling all those low powered and second-rate cheap Androids? What happens to the conflict minerals used inside the cheap devices that constitute the majority of Android’s market share? Is that level of waste good for the planet? Is your parsimonious convenience really a fair price to pay in exchange for the environmental damage you are asking your grandchildren to deal with? (Apple will recycle old iPhones if you send them back, by the way.)

Pixel is the new Nexus. It ships in two sizes (similar to the iPhone). It looks like an iPhone. If the new iPhone was ‘boring’ because it used the same basic iPhone design, then how much more boring is the Google competitor?

It’s really boring.

In fact, it’s worse than boring. It’s also imitative. Here we have a perfect illustration of the creative and cultural redundancy that is the true face of Google. A company that dominates the smartphone industry in terms of OS market share is completely incapable of designing anything new. It just doesn’t know how to do it.

This is because imitation is central to Google’s DNA. Think about it. Google search relies on other people’s content. It’s ads business relies on other people’s content. And now, with its new flagship Android neo-iPhone, the company shows that when it comes to design it really doesn’t have a clue.

Google is boring.

Consumers aren’t stupid.

The smartphone emperor has no clothes.