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Google's Nexus One Phone Launches
The press conference at the Googleplex is over and Google's Nexus One phone has launched (official Google blog announcement). The NY Times confirms the bare details: manufactured by HTC; $529 unlocked, $179 with 2-year T-Mobile contract; coming to Verizon in the US, and Vodaphone in Europe, in "Spring 2010." The Times notes one desirable feature: "[Google] has also voice-enabled all text boxes in the device, so a user can speak into the device to, for instance, compose an e-mail, rather than type the text of the email." Walt Mossberg points out one limitation: "On the Nexus One, only 190 megabytes of its total 4.5 gigabytes of memory is allowed for storing apps. On the $199 iPhone, nearly all of the 16 gigabytes of memory can be used for apps." No answers yet to the obvious questions: can it tether on T-Mobile? Will it allow VoIP?
It seems like this is just another HTC (?) made device... Beside the tts capacity, does anyone know what really sets this thing apart from the Droid\G1\etc??? This may finally be the spark I need to leave ATT, so what makes this thing so great??
I know that Verizon and T-Mobile phones use SIM cards, so theoretically you could unlock those phones and switch networks, but why won't there be a Sprint version?
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but it seems either A) shortsighted of Google to ignore the largest cellular network, or B) stupid of Sprint to pass up such a kickass phone...
Since T-Mobile already allows VOIP without any problems on their existing phones and data plans, and since the Android app store has at least two good SIP applications why would there be any question if VOIP is allowed or not?
Google might be trying to pass this off as "just a showcase", but their other "partners", including Motorola, gave Google a lot of information that is now being used against them.
And yes, I told you so!
I wonder if comping to Verizon "Spring 2010" means that it supports both GSM and CDMA (and so the unlocked one would work now), or if we're talking seperate CDMA hardware in the Spring (less appealing).
I don't know what the hiccup is in offered dual-mode devices. The BlackBerry Storm actually manged to do that - it's a shame it sucked at everything else, but if they got that right then it can't be too hard :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Mod me as troll if you want, but its not surprising that Mossberg rushes to defend an Apple product in the face of a new competitor. He also neglects to point out in his comparison that the 16 GB of storage on the iPhone is typically filled with music, leaving much less than that for applications.
No LTE. Less space than a drobo. Meh.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
For this current model, I think the voice feature will be the most significant: every text field is voice enabled, making the touchscreen-only keyboard a bit less painful.
If they use the same technology as they use for the Google Voice transcriptions then it won't be so useful. My experience is that it gets 20-25% of the words right. SOMETIMES the transcriptions I get are enough to get the jist of what the call was about - other times it's like a bad babblefish version of it.
Unless they're using something different, I think Voice Recognition has a long way to do - and may never quite be there. Heck even for real people it's hard to understand just what someone said.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm pretty underwhelmed by the announcement.
I have an iPhone, I live in NYC, and my network is terrible. That's exactly the kind of problem markets are supposed to solve, right? I should ditch AT&T and go with a competitor.
The problem is that my phone cost $300, the Apple Care costs $70 (and you need it because the battery is sealed into the phone, and won't last 2 years), and there's a $175 early termination fee. So walking away is pretty expensive.
This Google phone will have essentially the same deal. You'll still be tied to a carrier, and it will be expensive to walk away. Maybe Verizon or T-Mobile will be a lot better than AT&T. Or maybe when many millions of people buy these data hungry phones in a short period of time, their networks will sink just like AT&T's has.
We need to commoditize wireless bandwidth. We want a universe in which we buy our phones directly, we own them, and we can choose which networks to plug them into. And if a network is bad, we have to be free to walk.
These walled gardens are always going to give us crummy throughput, unreliable service, and restrictions on the apps we can run. Just swapping one corporation (T-Mobile) for another (AT&T) isn't going to fix anything. Maybe they'll be marginally better. But without a real market operating, and the ability for us to move around in response to the quality of service we receive, we'll never get a good wireless network.
Not true. You only think this because your phone gave you brain cancer.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
according to the nexus one specs, the UMTS Band (2100/AWS/900) will not support ATT network 3G but does work on T-Mobiles 3G network. T-Mobile 3G and voice coverage is one of worst in US.
Your expectations for cost are unrealistic, although it would help a lot if the US would ban bundling of plans with phones. The real cost of phones is now routinely subsidised by cellphone plans, preventing real competition on either cost.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Is anyone else sick of this contract subsidizing excuse? Yes, I realize you can't sell a phone like this for $25, but all these phones have an insane price if you buy them out of contract. I have a hard time believing these things cost anywhere near $500 to build. For example, the ipod touch starts at $200, which is obviously sold for a profit. Meanwhile, the iphone (a pretty damn similar device), is $500. Its not like you get a reduced monthly price if you bring your own phone.
"I'm pretty underwhelmed by the announcement."
Golly, who didn't see that coming?! Go away you fucking hipster loser. No one gives a fuck what some idiot with an iPhone has to say.
Like most recent android phones the hardware supports multi-touch. Also like most recent android phones multi-touch isn't used in the basic interface by Google, supposedly because of legal threats from Apple. (No, i haven't seen anything specific about those supposed threats, though i have seen an analysis claiming that Apple doesn't actually have a patent on "pinch to zoom." So i dunno what's actually up with the supposed legal threats. Anyone have a link they want to share?)
However there's nothing preventing other developers from using multi-touch in their apps. So if someone wants to add multi-touch to a game they're writing for Android app store there's nothing stopping them as far as i know.
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It would seem that many people outside of the US, including Canada and Germany, upon visiting www.google.com/phone have been receiving an error message saying "Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country."
I guess it doesn't go on sale in those countries until some undisclosed date.
That will, likely, change though, going forward, don't you think? And when (if) it does change, it shouldn't instantly outclass a field of pretty usable devices. Don't get me wrong, I mean, I actually hope Android developers continue to write minuscule, beautiful code, that sips space and resources, into perpetuity; really I do...But I wouldn't wager on it.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out (as AT&T insists in their commercials against Verizon) that 2G should be good enough for anybody, and the Nexus One will work on AT&T's 2G network that they think is so awesome.
I hate to say this, but between my iPhone and my WinMo, I think I like my WinMo phone the best.
Don't get me wrong, it sucks. The UI is terrible. And it crashes. A lot.
However:
- Want to thether for free even though your carrier wants you to pay extra? There's a WinMo app for that.
- Want to thether for free via your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot so that everyone in your carpool can access the interenet at once? There's a WinMo app for that, too.
- Hell, I can even run two programs at once and mount my phone as a disk drive and fill it up with whatever I damn well please.
Seems like pretty basic/essential functionality to me.
according to the nexus one specs, the UMTS Band (2100/AWS/900) will not support ATT network 3G but does work on T-Mobiles 3G network. T-Mobile 3G and voice coverage is one of worst in US.
as far as i know, no smartphone covers both AT&T and T-Mo's 3g network. no existing android phone does, and the iphone doesn't. blackberry sells two different hardware versions of it's phone models, one to cover each band.
it's not some insidious plan, it's the economics of supporting two different 3g networks.
Banning bundling would be harsh for users who "can't afford" to pay full price up front, and would rather spread the real cost of the phone across the length of the contract. This scheme greatly increases sales in markets where consumers are focused on short-term benefits (at the cost of long-term payment/debt).
Making an unbundled option mandatory would be a better goal. Good luck getting either option legislated, though.
Google wants a plethora of devices, the Google phone seems to be the first attempt to try and create an unlocked phone marketplace, which will help their cause. This new phone is a small attempt to start doing that. Maybe so the wireless carriers cannot easily block Google's advertising.
More evidence that this is about advertising is Apple's purchase of mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
See here for lengthy back-and-forth with two guys who've had the phone in their hands since late last month.
If you read the whole thing, they've got benchmarks and such. It's really long though.
I got a G1 on launch day, I've been a T-Mobile customer for over 7 years now; however I called T-Mobile to see if they could upgrade my dated G1 to a Nexus One (I'm not due for an upgrade until the end of July, but T-Mobile is famous for cutting loyal customers a break when it comes to that) and they said that unfortunately the phone is being sold through Google and it's out of their hands. I was pretty psyched about getting one, but there is no way I'm paying $530 for a phone; bottom line, right now I'm an unhappy Android User, Google Customer, T-Mobile Customer, and geek. Instead I could have been $180 lighter and happy on all counts. I guess I'm skipping the Nexus One and upgrading to whatever the next "must-have" is later in the year.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out (as AT&T insists in their commercials against Verizon) that 2G should be good enough for anybody, and the Nexus One will work on AT&T's 2G network that they think is so awesome.
Not good enough for anybody, just good enough for those used to other provider's "3G" speeds, which aren't much better than AT&T's 2G speeds. If you're already used to AT&T's 3G speeds, this will be a noticeable step down.
E pluribus unum
Will it blend?
I noticed on the tech specs page that Nexus One supports Ogg Vorbis audio. Do other Android phones support Ogg Vorbis playback? I mean, it would seem like that would be a feature of the base Android platform, but IIRC, when the G1 launched, Ogg support wasn't included? I know - it's been over a year since the G1 launched, and a lot has changed in newer versions of Android. Still, have any of the other *currently released* Android phones come with Ogg decoder?
The required storage space for Google Earth is 2GB. I find myself wondering about this 190MB limitation. Are talking RAM or disk space here?
They don't need to ban subsidizing. Just mark the subsidized portion on the Bill and if I bring my own hardware then don't charge me the subsidy. I think the average person might even start to think more of buying unlocked phones if they saw how much of their bill was a subsidy. But in reality there's nothing wrong with subsidizing phones, as long as you give me a discount for not taking your subsidized phone.
What are the charging times and use-between-charges metrics for this phone? The only Android based phone I've seen is a friends that sometimes barely lasts a day without a recharge even if you don't use it at all for calls/data/anything during that time, and it was that bad from new. That would make that phone useless to me as I am sometimes a day or two between convenient power outlets during which time I need to use my phone... Also, can the battery be easily and cheaply replaced if it degrades, unlike the batteries in Apple's product line?
"On the Nexus One, only 190 megabytes of its total 4.5 gigabytes of memory is allowed for storing apps. On the $199 iPhone, nearly all of the 16 gigabytes of memory can be used for apps." It's a bit disheartening to see garbage FUD like this make its way into a slashdot summary. It's been known for quite some time that the Android OS allow developers to store app resources on the SD card. A number of Android apps do this, already. An official update to make it easier for developers to do what they're already doing is in the works.
Yes, Android currently only lets you install application packages on internal memory. Application developers know this, so there's a major effort made to keep the application footprint small, and then have the applications download and store additional resources on the SD card, which has no such limitations. As an example, a game would store its levels/media on the SD card. Or in the case of an offline GPS app, the map data would be stored on the SD card.
With my Droid, I've yet to get anywhere close to this limitation, and I'm always on the hunt for neat apps on the market. I currently have 162MB free (I believe it originally had 250MB available).
Yes, it's not inconceivable that you'll run into this limitation, but at the same time, it doesn't come up all that often. Don't be concerned that your iPhone is using 3GB for app storage...on an Android device those apps would be putting 95% of their data on the SD card.
Disk space - but the limitation only applies to executables and libraries - the 2GB of data that Google Earth comes with could go on the SD card.
You're totally right, but here's what I foresee happening:
Disruptive cell phone company builds a phone that has all that hardware to support consumer choice.
A few people buy it, and maybe 1/10 of those people actually move from provider to provider. Once those folks have moved a couple of times, they run out of choices unless they move to a new region.
Within the product's two-year life cycle, a brazillian new features come into existence.
Purchasers of the disruptive phone decide to go with a less hardware-laden model which costs $100.00 less.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Well, in this country, we have a bunch of besotted couch-potatoes whose idea of fixing this problem is to Wait For the Free Market Fairy to Come Solve It For Them.
Meanwhile the Free Market Fairy is alive and well and giving oral service in the Verizon executive washroom. One of the funniest parts of being alive in 2010 is listening to people talk about free markets who wouldn't know one if they were clapped in stocks and sold at auction in one.
The FCC could solve all of this with a few modest policy changes. Transparent billing, disclosure rules, contract practices. All that would help the economy and would be universally popular except among a tiny group of startlingly well-paid bribery facilitators ("lobbyists"). Regulating this industry is not rocket science; you could imitate virtually any other country's approach to cell phones and do better. Too bad I don't hear much of anything coming out of this FCC besides occasional bold statements. I expect better from Democrats, especially since their brand could use the popularity more than the bribes right now. Cest la vie.
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Google is an international company based in California, HTC is an international company based in Taiwan. The Nexus One is intended to be sold internationally.
I can use the N1 on any Telco here in Australia as well as in Singapore, Malaysia and most of Europe because it uses the 2100 MHz frequency. The problem is that US telco's don't want to have a common frequency and why should HTC go to the extra expense of adding additional or more expensive transmitters to cater for a tiny percentage of the global market. If the US had a single common frequency then the N1 would most likely support it. This is not Google limiting your choice, this is the US telco's limiting your choice. Google and HTC made their decisions based on the global market, not the US market which means they chose to support the GSM 2100 and 900 MHz frequencies.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If you care about opensource, then you should be getting a Nokia N900, not Google's half proprietary system.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.