Google Nexus event: live updates and news from the Nexus 5X and 6P announcement

There weren't many surprises in Google's event today — everything from detailed phone specs to news of a Spotify Chromecast deal leaked in the past few weeks. But the company announced a hard date for its Android Marshmallow release, and it offered some much-needed hardware refreshes, including two new Nexus phones, an updated Chromecast, and an all-new Chromecast for streaming music. There wasn't a lot of experimentation here — with a few exceptions, like a new fingerprint sensor for the Nexus line — but that also means we got a lot of welcome news about Google's more practical products.

Last year's Nexus 6 smartphone from Google and Motorola lived up to its name: With its 6-inch display, it outsized almost all other phablets in fashion at the time, including the new iPhone 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

Read next: The Nexus 6P review.

The big surprise at today's Google announcement was the Pixel C, an Android tablet developed by the team behind the Pixel Chromebooks. The Chromebook Pixels have powerhouses of speed and wonders of design — and they definitely had the prices to match those outsized ambitions. The same thing applies to the Pixel C. It starts at $499, but you're also going to want to pony up for the keyboard, which costs $149. That's pretty-good laptop territory, so does the Pixel C actually compete with a pretty-good laptop?

Well, sort of. It's technically impressive. The hardware is brushed metal and the whole thing feels solid, if a little thick. Google has opted for an Nvidia Tegra X1 processor and a powerful graphics card to go with it. So in terms of raw power, there should be enough here to do what you need. The question is whether or not Android in tablet form can claim the same. It's possible, but we'll need to see the software ecosystem for full-fledged tablet class Android apps get a bit bigger before we'll believe.

Google revealed a pair of new Nexus smartphones today: the mid-range Nexus 5X and the high-spec Nexus 6P. It's the first time the company has brought out two Nexus handsets in one year, and, as ever, it's positioning the devices as the archetypal Android smartphones, with both running the latest version of its mobile OS, Android Marshmallow. Big features for Marshmallow include longer battery life thanks to Doze (which basically tells apps to go to sleep when the phone hasn't been used in a while), and Now on Tap, which lets users tap and hold the home button to bring up contextual information via Google Now based on whatever is currently on their screens — be it song lyrics or restaurant reviews. Read next: The Nexus 6P review and Nexus 5X review.

There's probably no other Android phone in recent memory that elicits as much affection as 2013's Nexus 5. The wide phone found a place in many people's hearts thanks to a rock-bottom price paired with good performance and a plastic design that grew on you. Of course, the fact that it ran an unadulterated version of Android that was true to Google's own vision for the OS didn't hurt.

Read next: The Google Nexus 5X review.

Android security has always faced a daunting challenge — scrambling to get users, manufacturers, and carriers in sync — but the new Marshmallow operating system has a small feature that could make a big difference in that fight. You'll find it in the Settings menu, a header titled "Android security patch level," followed by a date. As of that day, your device is protected with all known Android patches.

Read next: The Android 6.0 Marshmallow review.

Google just announced two new versions of its popular streaming stick, Chromecast, but it also showed off a few impressive new features coming to the Chromecast app. And the biggest by far is universal voice search.

When the update rolls out to Android and iOS devices, you'll no longer have to go hunting through all your other apps to find the things you want to watch. Instead of digging through the Netflix, Google Play, or Hulu apps to see who has the newest episode of, say, Rick & Morty, you can just open the Chromecast app and speak (or type) your search there. The app will tell you which services have the show you're looking for, and will even direct you to apps that you don't have if the show or movie can be found there.

Google's high-end Pixel range just expanded. At today's Nexus Event, Sundar Pichai announced the new Pixel C, a 10.2-inch tablet with USB-C that starts at $499. And instead of running Chrome OS, this Pixel runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Read next: The Android 6.0 Marshmallow review.

During its Nexus event today, Google announced that its Chromecast has finally been updated with support for Spotify, confirming a report by 9to5Google from last week. The streaming service with over 75 million users has been one of the few music holdouts that didn't work with Google's Chromecast, instead focusing on its Spotify Connect to play music in your home.

If you pick up Google's new Chromecast Audio, it will let you take your music from Spotify (Premium members only) and send it to any speaker or amplifier with a 3.5mm audio port. The $35 dongle will be receiving multi-room support later this year as well (each speaker or amplifier will need a separate Chromecast Audio) which could make for a pretty cheap home audio setup.

Chromecast users, now over 20 million strong, you can soon use that little dongle to watch The Affair. At its major fall event, the company announced that Showtime will be adding Chromecast support starting today. Going further, services like Sling TV, NBA, and NHL will all support casting soon as well — "in the next few weeks" in the case of Sling.

Google today also announced a revamped, more colorful Chromecast (that now thankfully supports 5GHz Wi-Fi) in addition to a dedicated Chromecast audio dongle, both of which cost $35 apiece.

The Chromecast catalog is expanding. Google's new Chromecast Audio does for home speakers what the standard Chromecast does for TV sets: creates a bridge between old tech and modern streaming services.

The new Chromecast Audio device looks nearly identical to the new disc-shaped Chromecast, except instead of HDMI, there's a standard 3.5mm audio port that plugs directly into the back of a speaker or receiver. It also supports RCA or optical audio outputs.

Google today officially announced that its Play Music service will soon offer a family plan option. Currently, a single subscriber for Play Music costs $9.99 per month, but the new plan will offer up to six subscribers for $14.99 per month.

Google's new plan is a clear answer to Apple Music's family plan, which many view as the most valuable part of that service. Spotify and Rdio also offer family plan options, but both are more expensive than Google's or Apple's.

In May, Google introduced a brand-new version of its Photos service that we called the best in the world. From the ashes of Google+ had come a full-featured service for storing, organizing, rediscovering, and more easily sharing all the photos in your life. It stripped out the social features that had constrained its growth and built a service that adopted privacy as a design principle. It offered unlimited uploads at a relatively high resolution. And it used machine learning to understand the content of your photos, allowing you to search for them via keywords.

Since its launch, it's been a top 10 iOS app, and has been installed on Android devices more than 100 million times. And Google has added a rediscovery feature into the app, surfacing old photos on their anniversaries in the manner of Timehop. But today it's getting its first major update, adding Chromecast support and the ability to add name labels to Google's photo collections of your friends and loved ones. The company also announced that a feature for letting friends join and contribute to your albums, a la Apple's shared photo streams, will arrive later this year.

Google just announced onstage at its event in Mountain View that the two newest phones — the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P — will be compatible with Project Fi, the company's own mobile network. These will be the first phones outside of the Nexus 6 that work with Project Fi when they go on sale in October.

Project Fi works by combining Wi-Fi calling with a cellular network connection (Fi is compatible with and can alternate between Sprint and T-Mobile). The phone always picks the fastest available network from one of three sources all while simplifying the payment structure of your cell phone bill. For $20 per month, users get the same things they've come to expect from any carrier, like talk, text, Wi-Fi tethering, and international coverage, along with a flat cost of $10 per GB per month for cellular data (both in the U.S. and abroad). Users also get credited for any unused data during each month.

Google's latest hardware offerings will come with a new option for authentication. On stage at an official event, Google engineering chief Dave Burke today announced a new fingerprint reader, dubbed Nexus Imprint and available on both the 6P and 5X. Burke described Imprint as a "seamless way of authenticating with your fingerprint," requiring less than 600 milliseconds to recognize a fingerprint, and improving with each use. The new sensor is open to the entire ecosystem, allowing easy verification within third-party apps.

Google's biggest phone just got a bit smaller. On stage in San Francisco this morning, Google unveiled the Nexus 6P, a new version of its Nexus 6 smartphone with a slightly smaller 5.7-inch display and a completely new design. The phone is only 7.3mm thick and is supposed to be about the same overall size as the iPhone 6 Plus — that means it's fitting a slightly bigger screen into a body of about the same size. That screen, a WQHD AMOLED display, actually makes up nearly three quarters of the front of the device. Google used the event to announced the Nexus 5X, too.

Read next: The Nexus 6P review.

Read next: The Nexus 5X review.

Two years after their successful collaboration on the Nexus 5, LG and Google are back with a new flagship Android smartphone: the 5.2-inch Nexus 5X. Along with the Nexus 6P from Huawei, also announced today, this new smartphone will debut in October and showcase Google's latest Android OS, Marshmallow.

Android just keeps on getting bigger. Last year, Google announced that its mobile operating system had over a billion active users, and at this year's Nexus event, the company revealed that this figure has now topped 1.4 billion actives over the last 30 days. "The scale at which everything is working is pretty breathtaking to see," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, emphasizing that the company is always investing "in large, open ecosystems, platforms." Google Play is one of those, with Pichai announcing the platform now has over 1 billion active users. He also mentioned that over 20 million Chromecasts have been sold to date.