At Google, I'm expecting a spectacle from the technology sector's equivalent of the Green Party

This week I’m heading down to Google – or at least to a huge building in London that Google has hired out – for the launch of its latest phones.

These big events are the highlights of the technology journalists’ calendar: March belongs to Samsung’s flagship phone, while all of September is given over to the brand new iPhone. As October heralds autumn, it also brings with it Google’s event.

Tuesday will see the launch of the Google Pixel 3 phone, as well as a whole range of other new products. We know that because the company has leaked just about everything about the phones this year, losing control of them so much that some are already on sale on the black market.

Google has in recent years been stuck in a strange bind: it makes what this technology editor thinks are by far and away the best Android phones on the market, but which the world has struggled to get excited about. They offer all kinds of intriguing and exciting features, but are for the most part neglected in favour of the latest Samsung Galaxy or iPhone.

So each Google event is, if nothing else, an interesting opportunity to see how the company is going to try and get people worked up about its new handset this time around. Previous tactics have included taking shots at Apple, putting people in VR headsets, composing some thrilling TV ads, and taking even more shots at Apple.

There’s been much debate in recent years about whether these big keynote events – which Steve Jobs elevated to the level of dramatic theatre and which the company he founded are still the undisputed giants of – are necessary at all. They cost the companies holding them vast sums of money, and the journalists covering them expend equally huge amounts of effort, stress and time; it’s hard to argue that they are a more effective way of communicating the ins-and-outs of a new phone than showing them off individually or even just making a video about them.

But there is something about the spectacle that makes these big keynote events live on, just as with the continuing importance of the political party conference season. (Google is probably the Green Party in this analogy: a company full of plenty of good ideas that others will surely steal, but which won’t make a great deal of difference to people’s day-to-day lives.) The events are a whirlwind of specs, features, demonstrations and PR. They combine everything stressful about a concert with all the rapid-fire selling of a TV shopping channel.

But at the end of them you see sometimes era-defining products before anyone else and get to introduce them to the public. It’s a wearying, confusing experience, and it is the best job in the world.

Yours,

Andrew Griffin

Technology editor