Google’s Nexus One and the future of Android
If you haven't heard of the Nexus One yet, you will. Over the past 48 hours, tweets started rolling in of a potential first party 'Google phone', flying directly in the face of previous statements from Google themselves of staying strictly a platform developer. Actually, Google still hasn't moved into the hardware space. Rather, this appears to be a Google branded HTC device, the Passion / Bravo (engadget link), which makes sense given HTC's history and future plans with the Android platform.
I'll leave the specs to the tech blogs, here's some links:
Got all that? Good. So what does this all mean? Google's sudden announcement of sorts (of course, this is still all very unofficial) could signal an important shift in the way Google is marketing Android. Clearly, the real competition for Android is the Apple iPhone OS. Apple has always been a hardware manufacturer who also makes their own software and OS, however Google has always kept a hard line of being the exist opposite, focusing on data as a product. If Android is to succeed, part of that success will be to distance itself from the third party only precedent that Windows Mobile has already set, and adding a first party device could help to do just that. Even Microsoft has realized the value of a first party device with the often rumored pink phone.
Android is still a third party first platform, and although this may create some buzz for Android in Q1, this is still a third party phone from HTC with a Google logo on it. That does make it a gold standard Android device (with no third party skins and theoretically first priority ROM updates), but so is the Droid, so what is the justification for Google? If the no contract purchase rumor holds true, is this just Google making an attempt to try and shift the market away from subsidized devices? We'll have to wait and see, but since we've already effectively seen the ROM that will be in the device in the Droid (2.1), that really only leaves room for hardware surprises to capture market share. We'll likely see what cards Google has to play at CES in January.
Jeff dePascale is a web and mobile applications professional based in Fairfield County, CT.
