Should Google kill the Nexus One?
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
It does more than the iPhone out of the box - IM, free contact, calendar and Facebook sync, native Gmail, turn by turn navigation, and tons of technological improvements and finely tuned small details. Granted, it's not a revolution, just evolution, but it is the best phone out there right now.
Also, the 20,000 figure (for first week sales) that keeps being quoted everywhere is just a ridiculously inaccurate statistic.
A minimum viable product phone is simply not acceptable for someone like my mother who would by the phone because it has Google's name on it. (Yes. I understand that example has a fallacy or two, but it should make my point clear.)
On the other hand, I keep on getting more and more interested in this phone!
The minimum is always moving.
It would be a different story if the Nexus One were tailored for a niche market. And, in fact, it arguably is: for much of the geek target market, the market of people who know what multitasking is and thrill to read the fine print on the contracts at the Android App Store, the Nexus One is far more than a minimum viable product. And so it seems to get a lot of buzz in that market. Hopefully its market is large enough to sustain something like it.
Further, whatever possible (unlikely) brand damage a moderately unsuccessful piece of hardware would do to Google it would pale in comparison to what would happen if they pulled it from the market.
Google isn't the kind of company that needs things to be an overnight success, I think in the long run they will gain ground.
Give Google a year and they'll be fine.
I haven't bought it yet though, I'm hoping someone else will try it first and let me know if it works.
The places where it lags behind are precisely where the iPod Touch is leagues ahead - the App Store, the music/video player, the integration with iTunes, etc. I'd even briefly considered getting a Nexus One for the aforementioned strengths and using my iPhone as a glorified iPod Touch for the weaknesses. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do it the other way around.
I wonder how cheaply one could be manufactured by someone that wasn't Google or an existing manufacturer. I wouldn't want to get in a business trying to compete with Apple based on price alone though. Maybe if your handset completely supported Google Voice for unlimited minutes over a T-Mobile prepaid data only SIM card for $30/month but I'm not sure if the carriers and Google would allow you to do that.