More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than iPhones – Nexus One Sales Very Slow | Hacker News Reader

More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than iPhones – Nexus One Sales Very Slow

mobilecrunch.com

15 pointsaresant23 comments

This is badly titled. It should be "More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than The First Generation iPhone Sold In It's First 74 Days"

The quoted article actually puts a lot of effort into pointing out how much things have changed since the first iPhone went on sale (for one the iPhone was being sold for $599 with contract)

Here's why:

The N1 is not on Verizon.

The N1 came out after all the people waiting for an iPhone-like device on Verizon had already bought a Droid.

Also:

They don't market the N1 as hard as the Driod or iPhone.

They don't sell the N1 at brick and mortar stores.

I don't really get why they don't sell it at brick and mortar stores. I mean, I understand that they're trying to buck the usual trend of selling locked phones on contract, so selling them through carriers wouldn't make much sense. But you could still probably sell them through electronics stores like Best Buy and RadioShack.

They seem to be marketing it pretty heavily to the developer demographic. Almost every programming-related site that I've gone to in the past few weeks which uses Google Ads has had a Nexus One ad on it somewhere.

The Nexus One is a way for google to regulate the android market. They control the phone, release features. It's a benchmark for carriers and phone manufacturers.

Google should have just called it the Developer Phone 2. We don't always need to label something a winner or a loser in this world.

The Nexus is what it is...and it's still a pretty good device.

Slightly absurd comparison and not really favorable to the Droid.

74 days:

       $200, Verizon, Droid - 1.05 million
    $500-$600, AT&T, iPhone - 1.00 million

Also, it took just 3 days for both the iPhone 3G and 3Gs ($200) to reach 1 million.

The Nexus One, on the other hand, was just timed poorly behind the Droid (IMO).

Difficult to believe. Why would I have the Fluffy thing? I did not install that much crapware on my phone.

The Nexus One is great, and buying from Google seems to be the preferred option if you want to stay up to date with the OS.

Maybe people are not used to buying from Google yet, or they just buy what their operators push at them.

Flurry is an analytics service that you don't install, but is probably integrated into one or more apps. It's not necessarily a perfect view of the market (not everyone buys Market apps), but it's pretty good.

I do agree that the Nexus One experiment was very much about the sales channel, which is definitely in a state of transition.

What are examples of popular apps with Flurry?

It may just be a timing issue... I have a G1 and still almost a year until I can get the contract upgrade from T-Mobile. Once I can get it for $180, I'll probably snap one right up.

Although I admit I will deeply miss the hardware keyboard...

Maybe the keyboard isn't dead yet ...

More likely it's operator driven sales. Motorola and Verizon put (and continue to do so) a ton of muscle behind the Droid. The Nexus One on the other hand one isn't sold in operator channels and isn't advertised in the real world to any large degree. When the Nexus One arrives on Verizon Wireless it will be interesting to see if it stays outside or is sold internally.

It also could be that the Nexus One was simply a warning shot to the phone makers to shape up and start making powerful well designed Android phones and will never make it into real sales channels.

From what I understand about the Nexus One, it is incompatible with Verizon's network (and AT&T's 3G network, though it will work on AT&T's EDGE network). And from what I can gather, Google has no intention of releasing a rev2 with support for either Verizon's or AT&T's network.

What frustrates me about Motorola (and, by proxy, AT&T) is the lackluster Backflip. Outdated OS (Android 1.5), last-generation hardware (screen resolution, storage space, speed)... I wonder if AT&T prevented them from porting the Droid over due to their relationship with Apple/iPhone. When I called AT&T to find out when my contract was up, they tried to sell me on the Backflip - which, compared to the N1 and my iPhone 3G, is a serious downgrade.

(Adding an additional insult: three days later, I got a flier in the mail suggesting I re-up my contract by getting a free Nokia 6750 - a crappy flip-phone)

Where are you getting your info?

They seem to be selling nexus one as if it has support for At&T's 3G.

https://www.google.com/phone/choose?hl=en&gl=US&s7e=

Also it seems that they plan on releasing nexus one to Verizon if you scroll down... ("Coming Soon").

I don't see how they'd miss the whole point of their whole endeavor (to have people using their phone/OS on as many networks as possible) by not releasing the phone to as many networks as possible...

Maybe Google has an error on their website, but that seems like a hard sell to me...

The current Nexus One doens't support AT&T Wireless' 3G bands (which globally speaking are odd), but they are bringing out a model that does. At the moment you'll be using EDGE if you're on AT&T with a Nexus One.

Update: hey what do you know, they brought out the AT&T 850/1900MHz 3G banded version this morning. That may explain why I can't reach the store page. You can't buy it with service though.

The AT&T compatible phone is new as of today (or maybe yesterday). I just checked a day or two ago and it wasn't there.

Sadly, that means that you need to choose between a phone compatible with AT&T (and Rogers in Canada), and one compatible with T-Mobile and most of the rest of the world.

ooh, i see, so it was a matter of there being two different models of the nexus one, very interesting.

The current model is GSM, but they announced they are creating a CDMA version for Verizon Wireless.

http://www.google.com/support/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

"We are working hard to provide Nexus One phones optimized for the Verizon network - please stay tuned."

I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up within the next month.

"...Google has no intention of releasing a rev2 with support for either Verizon's or AT&T's network."

Actually, they are now, as of today (I checked just a day or two ago and the option wasn't there), selling a Nexus One compatible with AT&T's 3G frequencies. And they say that a Verizon compatible N1 will be coming some time this spring.

https://www.google.com/phone/choose

Sadly, you have to choose between an N1 with AT&T/Rogers compatible frequencies for 3G, and T-Mobile frequencies for 3G. Which means that you can't change carriers without losing your 3G connectivity. Right now, I'm in an area that T-Mobile doesn't cover, so AT&T would be my only choice. However, I may move soon, and T-Mobile has plans that are cheaper for what I want (mostly data, very little voice and text). I really wish I could get a phone on AT&T now, and then have the option of switching to T-Mobile if I move.

I don't think so with respect to the last sentence. I'm pretty sure it is just a failed attempt to make carriers irrelevant. I feel like Google has the same dream Apple does, to make carriers an interchangeable commodity, but logically that doesn't make sense since a phone is only as good as the service it's tied to, and the expense of a top quality unit necessitates a 2 year contract. People, quite logically, choose their carrier and then their phone, and Google et al. can rage against that machine for years but it won't change.

If they wanted to fire a warning shot, they would have made a deal with one of the major carriers and pushed the hell out of it, rather than selling it only to people who read Engadget.

Perhaps we have different definitions of warning shots. I was going for the, "Hey guys look at what we can do" variety while you're going for more of a, "We just took all your customers, back off" version. I think Google is fine not making handsets, they just want someone to make a best of breed handset and that hadn't happened before the N1.

I think the N1 has at minimum spooked Apple severely, which is probably exactly what Google was aiming for.

and the expense of a top quality unit necessitates a 2 year contract

meh!?

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