When I first see it, I’m not wholly surprised. He unwrapped one of the objects, a long rectangle, a familiar shape. It was well-matched to the grin he had on his face as he laid a handful of oddly shaped objects wrapped in black cloth on the table in front of him. It looked liked 80's MTV being watched on a broken television. He was wearing an outlandish, colorful button-down shirt. As usual, he bounded into the room with the kind of buzzy, restless energy that can be infectious if you spend time with him. My first meeting of the day was with Andy Rubin, but when it came to products, Duarte was the team member who met our group in a long glass-walled conference room with a stack of black boxes in hand. I expected to see a new phone, and there had been rumors of a tablet, but otherwise I knew little else about my visit.
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Instead of being ushered into a drab conference room, Google reps led me and a Verge video crew into a new Android building, a recently updated block of open working spaces that had all sorts of incongruous flair inside, like a Formula 1 race car alongside quirky, space-age furniture that was never quite comfortable to sit in. You can also watch this video on YouTube.
Players like Android head Andy Rubin, director of product management Hugo Barra, and of course, Matias. And this time, lots of key players wanted to talk not just about hardware and software, but about where the company goes from here. I was there to see what was coming next for the Nexus line and Android, but I didn't know exactly what I was going to see. That time around, I spent a few hours with Android's head of user experience - the colorful Matias Duarte - to explore the new look and feel of the software, hear his reasoning behind bold decisions like the in-house-designed Roboto font, and play with the Samsung-produced phone. Those products were the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), important releases for Google that proved the company had started to embrace design and user experience as much as its competition had.
The last time I had trekked across the country and south of San Francisco was in September of 2011, to see the Android team's new flagship phone and a version of its operating system that was set to change the face of the line completely. It's charming and bizarre in equal parts. A place where coding ideas and how-tos for relaxation are printed and hung in the men's bathrooms above the urinals.
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It's the kind of place where the uniquely Silicon Valley meshing of childish whimsy and a fervent, quasi-religious work ethic is in full swing. In some ways it's like a corporate realization of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones. It feels like an island, a place with its own set of rules, and it's easy to feel out of joint if you don't know the handshake. Google's campus in Mountain View is a weird place - a sprawling, flat expanse dotted with angular, gray buildings.