Google officially unveiled the Nexus 6P, the successor to its somewhat
underwhelming Nexus 6 phone today. The company designed the phone in
partnership with Huawei and after today’s event, we had a chance to
catch up with Jeff Hoefer,
the industrial design manager in charge of the Nexus 6P design. Hoefer
joined Google in February after almost nine years at Apple
“This is an evolution,” he said. “What we did is we looked at what
happened with [the Nexus 6] and what happened with 5 the previous year.
What we did with the 5X is an evolutionary change. With 6, what I wanted
to do is something a little bit more polarizing and very different in
the market.”
Hoefer was especially proud of the phone’s metal body. “It’s very
sculpted,” he said. “I’ve never seen a phone that has sculpted aluminum
like that. That’s very hard to produce. We really pushed our vendors to
do a good job with that.”
It’s a very clean, elemental look
.
The most iconic feature of the phone, though, is the black strip that
slightly protrudes from the back. It holds the camera, flash and laser
sensor.
“For me, the black strip is the portal to bringing the digital world
into your phone. I wanted something that would have some mystery to it,”
he argued. “Notice we don’t have an actual camera lens — like a
sapphire lens. The sculpted glass is something that’s very unique.”
He also pointed out that the strip allows the phone to sit on the
table without wobbling. “I didn’t want to have a bump on it. When you
put this on the table, it actually lies flat.” The Nexus 6 wobbled and
spun, he pointed out and also noted that the NFC antenna is in the
strip. “When you have an aluminum body, you don’t want to have a lot of
holes in it,” Hoefer said. “It’s a very clean, elemental look.”
.