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Nexus Prime, And Ice Cream Sandwich, Go For a Video Tour
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Examiner.com, citing a report at gagdet.ro, about Samsung's upcoming high-end Nexus Prime, the first phone to be delivered with Ice Cream Sandwich. "This version of the Nexus Series (Google's Android flag bearer) runs the next version of Android: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This version is meant to combine Honycomb (Android 3.0) with Gingerbread(Android 2.3) into one OS, that will run on all devices. In addition to the merger of the two OS's, it also changes the Android UI a bit. One major change, is that the icons and the UI is a lot more sophisticated and clean, making even iOS look old and clunky. Also, it removes the requirement for Android phones to have hard/soft-hard mixed buttons, in favor of allowing manufacturers to use whichever type of button they wish. Also, it adds a soft button on the lock screen, to go straight to the camera app."
NOT targeting the majority with your latest and greatest phone a wise move?
No sane business plan ever targets "the majority". That's an excellent way to set yourself up for failure. Every marketing strategy first targets a very small group and then new strategies are created to target the next group.
For example, even the first iphone targeted very specific users. Later it expanded with each iteration. The first iphone didn't have 3rd party app support and the iOS App Store wasn't available yet. It wasn't until 1.5 years AFTER the initial announcement of the first iphone that the itunes App Store was released.
The basics in marketing are to come up with a marketing strategy that will succeed in a specific target market. Make your target market everyone and you're guaranteed to fail.
I mean, this thing is meant to be THE Android Smartphone by Google(TM).
The nexus phones are Google's way of pushing the Android market where they would like to see it. You can think of it as "seeding" the competition.
For example when Google released the Nexus One, it was the first phone with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor. During this period, many manufacturers were trying to build the cheapest Android they could get away with so most of the phones came with slow processors and minimal RAM. Google didn't like that, and had the Nexus One built. With that came other "fast" phones (for the time) like the HTC Incredible which shared specs with the Nexus One VERY closely. That wasn't a surprise considering that HTC also manufactured the Nexus One. Immediately following this, all the other manufacturers followed up with their own offerings with similar or better specifications.
Sometime in the future, perhaps Google will start to compete with their own hardware. But at this point, I don't think that is their primary goal. The primary goal is to push the Android market forward. Secondary would be making money on the hardware since they already are the source for the OS.
As The Onion headlined a few days ago: "Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies". How apt.
You do know that The Onion is 100% satire? You've lost a lot of credibility with that kind of statement.