New Google Home and Chromecast could be announced at July smart home event
Could we see the Google Home 2 we’ve been waiting for?
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We could see the long-awaitedGoogle Home 2(orGoogleNest Home, as it may be called) very soon, as the company announced that it would be holding a’Hey Google' smart home eventon July 8.
The event is in place of the company’s annual Google I/O conference, and will take placevirtually, with Google promising “exciting new and upcoming features for smart home developers”.
The Google Home 2 is the rumored follow up to the brand’s flagshipsmart speaker, theGoogle Home, and though the July event is developer-focused, Google has said that it will use the event to “share our recent smart home product initiatives”, suggesting that new hardware is on the way.
The new Google speaker has apparently already been revealed to9to5Macby ‘sources familiar to the matter’, and it’s poised to sit somewhere in between theGoogle HomeandGoogle Home Max, the brand’s largest and best-soundingwireless speaker.
What the newGoogle Assistantspeaker will be called officially remains a mystery. A few years ago, Google placed the vast majority of itssmart home devicesunder the Google Nest umbrella, implying that the products were all interconnected and compatible with the Nest series ofsmart thermostats, alarms, andsecurity cameras.
Devices under this umbrella include theGoogle Nest Hub Maxand theGoogle Nest Mini– so we wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the new smart speaker is called the Google Nest Home, or something similar.
A new Chromecast
July 8 could also be the perfect time for Google to unveil its new Chromecast streaming dongle, which has been the subject of speculation for the last few months.
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Rumors of thenew Google Chromecast Ultradevice with a remote andAndroid TVbuilt-in were compounded recently, whenphotos of the donglewere circulated byXDAand XDA Recognized Developerdeadman96385, who found an ‘out-of-box experience’ video for the device (codenamed Sabrina) in a pre-release Chromecast firmware build.
Based on the images, the new Google Chromecast has been given a new oblong shape, but retains many of the same design cues from previous versions.
There’s not a huge amount of information on the specs of the new dongle, but XDA did discover that it will be running an Amlogic SoC that can supportDolby Visionplayback – and improvement on theChromecast Ultra’s4KHDR10 capabilities.
Right now, neither the Google Home 2 nor the Google Chromecast Ultra 2 have been confirmed by the tech giant, but we’re excited to find out whether July 8 will bring new and improved smart home devices for us to try out.
ViaThe Verge
Olivia was previously TechRadar’s Senior Editor - Home Entertainment, covering everything from headphones to TVs. Based in London, she’s a popular music graduate who worked in the music industry before finding her calling in journalism. She’s previously been interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live on the subject of multi-room audio, chaired panel discussions on diversity in music festival lineups, and her bylines include T3, Stereoboard, What to Watch, Top Ten Reviews, Creative Bloq, and Croco Magazine. Olivia now has a career in PR.
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