On top of getting treated with skydivers and extreme bike riders to demonstrate Project Glass yesterday at day one of Google I/O, attendees left the keynote with a very generous amount of upcoming Google Nexus gadgets.
Those lucky folk were the first to receive the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update, which includes some nice across-the-board improvements to the OS. That’s cute. Then on the hardware side of things, Google gave everyone a free Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, Nexus Q streaming media player, and Nexus 7 tablet. Total value of the three devices: approximately $850. If Google hadn’t lowered the price of the unlocked, contract-free Galaxy Nexus to $349 yesterday, the accumulated value would have been over $1,000.
Google I/O attendees were also the very first people in the world to get access to Project Glass. It doesn’t come for free — or anything close to free — but for a whopping $1,500, developers can pre-order Google Glasses and they’ll ship in 2013. The prototype glasses aren’t available to the mainstream yet and won’t be any time soon, but Google will have to chop off a large chunk of that price tag if it wants to see good sales numbers when it does hit the market.
Chances are you weren’t at the conference yesterday, so you’ll want to know regular pricing information. The Nexus Q and Nexus 7 will ship in July for $299 and $199 respectively — one insanely high price and one insanely low price. Jelly Bean will start out as an OTA update for the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus next month, but hopefully it’ll roll out to the majority of Android handsets by 2034.