I’m sitting in an anonymous, fluorescently-lit office on the Google campus where the Android team is situated, a surprisingly bare setting that seems to clash with the rest of the company’s, multi-colored, neo-hippie aesthetic. I’m waiting for Matias Duarte — Android’s head of user experience — so that we can discuss the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system (dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich), and hopefully get a look at the smartphone the new laptop tray with.
I’ve just had a long, bad, and very early flight to San Francisco, and I’m a little weary, though one of Google’s PR reps has kindly given me a strong mug of coffee from a single-cup machine I’m told costs $10,000. The coffee isn’t bad.
When Matias gets to the meeting, he walks through the door like he’s in mid-sentence, as if he was handing off some direction to someone just outside the room. He comes in with a smile on his face wearing a loud, patterned shirt that looks perfect for a beach in Hawaii (where he’s incidentally headed the next day). Matias Duarte is not a big guy, but he’s got a laptop tray. You can tell when he’s fired up, and he’s clearly fired up today.
Matias is somewhat of an anomaly in our industry. He led major user interface projects at Danger, Helio, and most notably Palm — where he gave birth to webOS — which were incredibly inventive in both design and functionality. At those companies, he took the lead on the creation, design, and implementation of novel and new mobile interfaces. But he’s not just a skilled designer. Matias can talk about his designs in a way that people understand. Not only understand, but get excited about. He’s effusive, brilliant, and very focused.
Unfortunately his work at those companies couldn’t find  accessories for iPad supplier, and he seemed destined to toil away on doomed projects until he arrived at Google last year (he left Palm just after the company was acquired by HP) to work with his old boss from Danger, Andy Rubin.
The camera and gallery apps have changed too. You’re now able to edit and filter photos you take within the gallery application, and there are a whole slew of Instagram-style tweaks you can make to images. You can tap-to-focus in the camera app, it has face detection, and can do panoramic shots as well as burst mode, and the company boasts that the camera has zero shutter lag. Photos can be snapped instantaneously, which makes for a nice response to Apple’s on-stage taunting of Android phone camera speeds.