Google announced Tuesday morning the release of the Nexus One, its new venture into Smartphone-land (er, excuse me, Google, that’s superphone) all made by them and no one else. Except, oops, it isn’t made by just them. They had a little help from their friends over at HTC and by that I mean they made the phone.
(Which is never good in my book because HTC phones are just terrible and their battery life lasts like, I don’t know, 2 minutes?)
Now, we’ve seen this before, especially with something else very Microsoft-oriented, the Zune. The first Zune (brownie, blackie, ice block was it?) was made by Flextronics — and we can see how great that turned out. Needless to say it wasn’t the most well-received media player to hit the market.
I understand that Google is a software company but even the biggest of software companies made the plunge into making their own hardware. At some point, calling the shots just doesn’t cut it. The result? Nexus One. I suppose one can make the argument that it’s Google’s first phone and it’s the trial phone…
But in essence that’s the entire problem. The Google Phone was the phone everyone was anticipating for the past couple of months. Google’s own architecture with its own software could have blown the competition out of the water instead it evaporated into a shell of itself (or the hype surrounding it) into what we can just call another iPhone-clone, as that’s the nomenclature for things like that these days. In truth, I don’t really know what even I was expecting but I’m sure I could have guessed every feature from its 3.7″ screen to its 5mp camera.
Of course the Nexus One does much that the iPhone can’t, it can multi-task with non-native apps, it’s got a fantastic camera and then some, the speech recognition… but unfortunately other than the multi-tasking (which, mind you, is an Android feature) they feel tacked on.
Quite fascinating, however, is the idea of Google’s new store, found at , where you’ll be able to choose a phone and a company for that phone. So far the only choices are, of course, the Nexus One, but Google says they want to add other Android phones like the Motorola Droid and ‘whatever other cool products’ (paraphrasing.) Okay. Whatever that means.
More so, it’s still stuck to the T-Mobile network and if you want it unlocked, you’ll have to pay upwards $500something and even then, if you use it with AT&T (which is most likely the reason you want it unlocked) it only works on AT&T’s EDGE network. Thanks? Google says they’re making a CDMA version for Verizon in the spring and that the unlocked phone and the store could inspire a new European-way of thinking, true resonance-type difference in the way phones are bought in America. But couldn’t the all-four-companies-ready phone be done by today?
With all that, I think we can truly call Nexus One “The Google Phone.” With quotations.
Most shocking is that Google makes such great kick-[explicative] apps that never fall short but boy, did this fall very short. Once again a side effect of too much hype, like the “Google could give its phone out with free-forever service for a one-time fee” rumor. Now that would have been cause for hype.
I suppose that’s the true argument: hype ruins everything.
Google, you innovate too many times to count. Though, if you proved anything today, it’s that you’re a company — and companies disappoint.
