Nexus One a Failed Experiment In Online Sales

shmG writes "The demise of the Google Nexus One phone is fairly straightforward: a lack of sales killed the product. While it will continue to sell through Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea and a few others, the experiment of Google indicates that selling a phone direct to consumers online is dead. 'The bottom line is people like to look at phones in the store. Google has a lot to learn about phone sales, this is one lesson they learned.'"

Comments

Re:False

[ani23]

Amen Most iPhone sales are online. Its not that they want to look at the phone in the store. They want it subsidized. wonder why they dont go subsidized via tmo and att.

The Nexus was the best phone purchase I ever made.

[joedoc]

I began considering the Nexus when Google first introduced it. Like most others, I was unsure because of the $529 price tag. My wife and daughter were also in the market for new phones. Having already owned an HTC G1, the question of Android performance was never an issue (I paid full price for that phone, too).

The issue for me was contracts. My contract with T-Mobile had expired, and I wasn't willing to lock into another one. T-Mobile had also just introduced some new no-contract plans, so I did some math.

I ran the numbers for getting a two-year contract with two new MyTouch 3Gs at the $149 subsidized price. I wanted an unlimited everything plan. Then I looked at the same idea, only I'd buy the MyTouch phones at retail ($399 each). with their no-contract Even More Plus plan. Over the course of the same two years, I would pay $500 *less* for the phones and the service, without a lock-in. Not only that, T-Mobile made me a great offer: if I purchased the phones in a retail store, I could pay $20 down on each, plus the sales tax (about $50 total for both phones), and then pay the phones off at $20 per month each, added to my bill, with no interest. I could pay off the phones at any time.

That $500 savings justified the cost of the Nexus. The girls love their MyTouch devices, and the Nexus is probably the best phone I've ever owned. I've already rooted and modded it. Buying it unlocked was a plus, especially when I traveled to Europe a few weeks ago: slip in a local SIM and off I went.

Perhaps I'm fortunate in that buying the phone at full price is something I can do, but the sales model is something that makes sense. I can see this becoming more common in the future: manufacturers create the devices, make them workable on multiple carriers (especially for data between AT&T and T-Mobile in the US), sell them unlocked and let people just pick a carrier and buy a plan.

Then again, I know what I want. I don't necessarily need to touch something to see it's value.

They DIDN'T EVEN TRY!

[YA_Python_dev]

Sorry for the uppercase, but this is infuriating: the Google online store was actively refusing to sell the damn phone to more than 95% of the world population!

There are tutorials all over the internet in all kind of languages with complicated and costly (more than US$ 100 on top of the official price) procedures to buy the Nexus One outside the US.

The thing has been available in Europe only after six months and has been frequently sold out for weeks in both stores and online stores. See e.g. the difficulties to buy it in the UK, France, Italy, eastern Europe, etc. from May to the beginning of July.

I've been trying to buy it (from Italy) for months and I've finally found one only three weeks ago thanks to a post on a forum that tipped the right store that had one available.

So before jumping to wrong conclusion, please try to avoid blocking more than 95% of the world population from your store (no jokes about starving African kids, please: Africa is less than 15% of the world population, and not everyone there is busy dying anyway). And keep in mind that people from Europe and some Asian countries get much better than the average American what these thing can do (the first thing I did with mine is installing bash and Python; and, yes, a powerful always-on pocket computer with GPS, constant internet access, camera and all kind of sensors can be programmed to do lots of new unusual useful things).