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‘Google Nexus One’ Category
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Google To Be Sued By Dick Family Over Nexus One Moniker
Google Inc., the California based search engine giant, recently launched its much awaited smartphone, Nexus One, whose name has been “inspired” from the Nexus series of Androids from the movie Blade Runner based on the sci-fi novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ written by the late Philip K. Dick.
However, the late author’s family members have complained that the company never contacted any member of the family or their attorney before using the name for its smartphone offering.
The daughter of Mr. Dick, Isa Dick Hackett, said that “We feel this is a clear infringement of our intellectual-property rights.” Isa Hackett is the CEO of Electric Shepherd Productions which is a subsidiary of the Philip K. Dick estate devoted to adapting the author’s works.
Hackett also added that the family was on the verge of taking legal action against the company and a legal consultation was underway and said that “Google takes first and then deals with the fallout later.”
The movie Blade Runner (1982), which inspired by the late author’s novel, revolved around a bounty hunter who chases Androids known as Nexus-6 models, across the universe.
Experts can’t help but notice the similarities as Google’s Nexus One is based on the Android operating systems.
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iFixit Rips Apart Google Nexus One, Uncovers Few Surprises
iFixit staff have ripped apart the brand new Google Nexus One days after it was released to the general public and unearthed a few interesting bits and pieces.
It was apparently much easier to open up and teardown the first smartphone from Google than any of Apple’s iPhone, something iFixit said the Cupertino-based company should take heed.
One could say that Google and HTC even expect users to open up and remove the phone’s parts. It would certainly make fixing the handset a doddle compared to its rivals, with most items fixed with a normal Philips screw.
Amongs the few tasty bits found are the Broadcom BCM4329 chip which will allow the Nexus One to be compatible with 802.11n WiFi network; there’s also a built in FM transmitter onboard, a useful feature that removes the need for any additional accessory if you want to stream music from the device to your in-car sound system for example.
The 5-megapixel digital camera also records movies in MP4 format, something that’s quite handy as well while the battery is a 1400mAh LiIon battery.
iFixit also points out that Qualcomm appears to be the biggest winner for the Nexus One with no less than three chips including the Snapdragon 1GHz processor.
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5 Reasons Why Google’s Nexus One Will Change The Mobile Industry Forever
The Google Nexus One will be changing the mobile industry forever, possibly to a greater extent compared to Apple’s iPhone. It is still too early to appreciate the paradigm shift that the search giant will be exerting on the industry.
We’ve gathered five reasons we believe GNO will mark the dawn of a new era for the mobile phone industry, one which will prove to be a challenge for many existing market actors .
(1) Traditionally, when new hardware is introduced, it often commands a significant premium. The Google Nexus One is a top of the range mobile phone, yet it will go on sale for far less than the likes of the Apple iPhone 3GS or the Motorola Droid.
As we mentioned here, the Nexus One will be available for the same price as a mid-range phone like the Nokia E72, roughly £320.
The GNO could singlehandedly force manufacturers – including its close partners from the Open Handset Alliance – to slash the average selling price (ASP) of their top of the range handsets at launch, something which could have some dire consequences for their revenues.
(2) Google is selling the phone to customers outside the US from day one and it is not a vulgar paper launch. The Nexus One is available with plenty of stock available, it seems.
The Apple iPhone was launched in the US only in the beginning before committing to a global launch schedule for the subsequent models.
(3) Furthermore, Google doesn’t seem to be going down Apple’s route by bargaining hard to get the most out of exclusive partnerships with mobile phone operators.
Instead, it will almost certainly try to get the phone in as many hands as possible as quickly as possible. It will be interesting to see whether the phone available to T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless will be unlocked ones.
(4) Google will shift the focus from the hardware to the software platform itself. The firm has stressed that the Google Nexus One will only be a conduit for its services and products just like Apple.
For traditional stakeholders like Nokia and Samsung, the phone was the end product until Apple came through and changed the outlook.
(5) Google may not issue a PAYG version of the Nexus One. Unless the mobile phone providers specifically ask for it, it is unlikely that Google will have one.
Eschewing a pay as you go model may force others as well to do the same and therefore explode the market by eliminating walled gardens that many mobile operators want to keep. It might also lead to a surge in SIM Free only deals.
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Nexus One: More Than A Phone, Less Than A Game-Changer @ CES 2010
Call me hopeful that Google’s announcement of Nexus One Tuesday helps it positively influence the evolution of an open, innovative wireless market.
Call me similarly hopeful that Google’s move into hardware — a bold decision that builds on its earlier success facilitating the creation of the Android mobile operating system and orchestrating the Open Handset Alliance’s go-to-market plans — will drive the success of the next truly competitive smartphone platform.
But as hopeful as I am, I’m not yet convinced that one phone can ever deliver all the goods. Nexus One is hardly the earth-shattering, apocalyptic shot that will catapult the smartphone market into next week.
While I give Google credit for managing to recreate a small fraction of the kind of gadget mania that’s driven Apple fandom for much of that company’s history, I feel compelled to be the guy that rains a little on everyone’s parade.
Yes, there’s a bulging list of super-cool features — for instance, speech input that actually works (and in virtually every major app, no less), a multi-colored trackball for customized alerts, dual-microphone noise cancellation for hands-free operation light years removed from the speaking-in-an-oil-drum experience of most current devices, and a slick interface that suddenly makes competing Android-powered devices look lame. Yet with all that, the Nexus One is hardly the “superphone” that Google claims it to be.
t’s not about the device
Even if Nexus One lived up to the hype and proved itself the greatest phone in the universe, that should not be enough for Google to paste “Mission: Accomplished” on its flight deck. Gadget worship may fill the comment sections of tech sites and blogs alike, but it isn’t what drives the industry.
The significance of Nexus One’s announcement has nothing to do with the device itself and everything to do with Google’s desire — nay, need — to control the mobile Web services experience as thoroughly and efficiently as it controls the desktop Web services experience.
Google is what it is today because it figured out how to monetize common online activities like search, e-mail, and productivity better than anyone else. It generates more money per unit of online end-user activity than any other Web-focused organization (Yahoo, you there?) a reality that gives it an ever growing pile of cash that allows it to invest in whatever next-generation initiatives it wants.
Still, while Google wishes it could ride the Web-on-a-conventional-PC gravy train forever, the real world has other plans. That’s because desktop and laptop PCs are yesterday’s news, with growth curves flatter than a Nebraska corn field.
Mobile platforms represent today’s and tomorrow’s explosive growth markets. Either Google converts its ability to connect advertisers with users of its services to a mobile paradigm, or it joins Microsoft and IBM in the shadowy category of companies that were once all-conquering, but retreated from their mythical status when the world changed and they failed to stay ahead of the curve.
The Android operating system was created under the auspices of the Open Handset Alliance, a Google-led 47-member consortium of hardware vendors, carriers and vendors. Android was supposed to keep Google ahead of that curve.
Designed from the start to be open in the same vein as Linux, Google’s goal for Android was to reduce costs to consumers, foster innovation, and accelerate the growth rate of mobile devices by driving them into markets unsustainable using conventional closed models followed by Research In Motion and Apple.
In that respect, Google has already succeeded. Since the first admittedly lukewarm HTC G1 appeared in the fall of 2008, the new OS has gained impressive momentum on a broad range of devices, and is now ideally positioned as a viable #3 to RIM and Apple.
Google has kept the good times rolling with continued updates to the OS and focused investment in a development ecosystem. The result? Application availability that just powered through 20,000 titles (small compared to Apple’s 100,000+, but still a respectable showing for a new player), and a fast-growing market share that research outfit Canalys pegged at 3.5% by the end of Q3 2009.
But in bringing its own phone to market, Google risks ticking off its alliance partners — especially the mobile handset vendors like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and LG, all of whom signed on to the project hoping Google would remain a benevolent partner and not a ruthless competitor.
If anyone’s looking for evidence that Google intends to play hardball, look no further than its choice of OS for the new device. For now, Android version 2.1 is available only on the Nexus One. How many bets Google continues to favor its own devices from here on out?
How many bets that Google doesn’t much care if it alienates a partner or two (or three) along the way in its pursuit of mobile OS and services dominance? How many bets its hardware “partners” already have dartboards mounted in their respective boardrooms?
When Google eventually falters
With all this in mind, it’s clear that while Nexus One is not the “superphone,” it is more than just a phone. It’s Google’s bet on its future. If history is any guide, it’ll turn out to be a bad bet, and Google’s attempt to stay dominant for more than one computing era will fail as surely as Microsoft’s attempt to navigate beyond desktop productivity and network software was.
Scoff now, but when we look back 10 or 15 years from now, the leaderboard will be as radically changed as the tools and processes that will define tomorrow’s business and consumer technology landscape.
Google won’t disappear, of course. But the King of the Technological World mantle will have been passed because the core competencies that ensure an organization’s eminence during one period of technological evolution (think mainframe, desktop, network, Internet, Web 2.0, mobile) almost never ensure eminence during subsequent periods.
Like career criminals who swear they’ll fly straight, we can cross our fingers and hope against hope that this time it’ll be different. But ultimately, we know this is how things have to play out.
The Nexus One is already being lauded as the great phone it is. But is it in and of itself a game changer? Hardly. The game is only getting underway, and like the competitors around it, Google has many moves yet to make.
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CES 2010 : Would Anyone Care For A ‘Superphone?’ Google’s Platform Play With Nexus One
The trifecta that was Apple’s iPhone introduction in January 2007 was on account of the successful introduction of a software platform and a truly revolutionary device, coupled with a massive surge in the functionality of iTunes — a compelling device on an intriguing platform, which itself was on a respected and advanced platform. Matching that achievement quite literally may never be possible for a smartphone, but it may be possible for something else.
The question today is, is the Google Nexus One that something else? There’s every reason to believe it will be a competitive device running on a newly respected platform that has seen some great improvements in recent months, Android. But Google aimed for the fences today by attempting to characterize a phone built by another manufacturer, with a software platform that’s already in existence and a hardware platform that’s already been proven in the field, as something else — something Google would like for you to call a “superphone.”
“The Nexus One is an exemplar of what’s possible on mobile phones through Android,” said Google Vice President for Product Management Mario Queiroz, during this afternoon’s press session at the company’s Mountain View headquarters. “The Nexus One belongs in an emerging category of devices, which we call superphones.”
And that was literally the end of that bullet point, as Queiroz closed his prepared remarks right there and began diverting to give credit to HTC. Although at first, Queiroz said the phone was designed in “very close partnership” with HTC, much later in the presentation, Google Vice President for engineering Andy Rubin would shift even more of the credit to HTC, telling a PC World reporter it would be “inaccurate” to describe Google as the designer of Nexus One.
Few were confused by the phone itself, which appears to be the next incremental step up from the HTC Droid Eris, introduced late last year on Verizon Wireless. The 480×800 AMOLED display promises to provide the very impressive color quality and contrast of the Eris, but with the resolution of Motorola’s Droid phone. The hardware platform is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, the same one used for new netbook-like smartbooks like Lenovo’s Skylight, introduced earlier today. So Nexus One will not be a stepped down computer; for all intents and purposes, it has the heart of a real netbook or even notebook (at 1 GHz), in pocket size.
Although Nexus One is not a multitouch device, it does include a secondary trackball-like sensor on the bottom, a glowing multi-colored ball that Google refrained from calling a “pearl.” However, besides characterizing its capability of being multicolored as an application in itself, the trackball was never demonstrated actually performing a function.
Nor was the touch-screen keyboard demonstrated, although it was seen briefly during a demonstration of voice recognition capabilities. If the Nexus One truly has a groundbreaking application at this point in its evolution, it’s the ability not just to respond to voice command, but to translate any voice into text. That feature uses Google’s voice translation server, and requires Internet connectivity, though the demo did show the device could translate text faster than most thumbs could possibly type it.
“It’s pretty great that I can actually enable a search box with voice,” stated senior product manager Eric Tseng, “but what if I could enable every single text field in the phone with voice as well? What if I could speak my tweets? What if I could speak my Facebook posts? What if I could actually compose a whole e-mail just by speaking it?”
But even though Nexus One will be kicking off that feature, the native voice-enabling of text fields, according to Tseng, is a feature of Android 2.1. So in the not-too-distant future, the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris will be getting these features as well — not-too-distant perhaps meaning just a few weeks.
Motorola’s mobile device CEO Sanjay Jha was on hand today to acknowledge that the Nexus One, a device built by rival manufacturer HTC, was in some ways slightly superior to the Droid phone that Motorola currently sells — a model that is believed to have been a holiday blessing for Motorola. Not that Jha would stand being edged out for very long, perhaps not even for a few weeks, he implied.
The presence of Motorola along with HTC during the launch of an HTC phone (although Jha had been “stuck in traffic” for the first hour), gave reporters on hand good reason to question what exactly is being launched here — and a few of them asked that question just that bluntly today. Is Android a Droid phone, like Motorola’s (since Sanjay Jha is seated right there) and like HTC’s?
There was no clear answer to that. What we heard today is that Motorola’s and HTC’s Droid phones will compete directly against Google’s Nexus One made by HTC. But the two manufacturers are happy with that — at least, so said Jha and HTC CEO Peter Chou, also on hand today — because Nexus One expands the market, giving Motorola and HTC and the other partners in the Open Handset Alliance room to compete.
But to compete against other Droids? Or other Androids? What exactly is the platform here — where does it begin and where does it end? Google’s representatives danced around this subject today, actually appearing as though they couldn’t adequately answer the question.
At one point, Queiroz presented Google’s Web site for the direct purchase of Nexus One as a platform unto itself, giving reporters a lengthy demonstration of a frankly boring set of choices. Nexus One is available now through Google’s online store for $529 unlocked, without contract.
Today, it’s available for $179 with a two-year contract on T-Mobile. And sometime this spring, presumably April, it will be available on Verizon Wireless in the US and Vodafone in Europe, for an unspecified amount with an unspecified contract term. So as some reporters asked today, what makes the Nexus One a “superphone,” worthy of its own platform name, if Google actively acknowledges that Motorola and HTC will be among the manufacturers competing against Nexus One with very comparable Droids?
Google did not have an adequate answer. “The difference between a superphone and a smartphone is just the evolution of the platform is such that the openness, coupled with these marketplaces and these app stores, that make it real easy for people to download third-party content, an ecosystem by which third-party developers can participate in the ecosystem, the [one-] gigahertz processors, the more memory, the gigabyte storage, these are all things that didn’t exist two years ago,” responded Google’s Mario Queiroz. “We just thought that the industry needed another term to refer to these innovations.
“This is just as powerful as your laptop was four years ago. If anything, you’re carrying these around in your pocket, they’re with you all the time, they’re now always on. And that’s all new. So we wanted to refer to it by something, and we think ‘superphone’ is the right way to refer to it,” Queiroz attempted to clarify.
At that point, eWeek reporter Chris Preimesberger attacked the subject from the opposite direction, asking Motorola’s Sanjay Jha to spell out how his company intended to compete with Nexus One. (It’s a sign of Google’s continuing experimentation with the notion of transparency, openness, but also inexperience that it invited a Nexus One competitor to speak at its rollout event.)
If there had been any distinctiveness in the Nexus One platform established by such granular factors as, for example, how customers are billed for monthly service (literally a platform feature, according to Queiroz), Jha made a wish and blew it away. “I think Nexus One is a good phone,” Jha told Preimesberger.
“I think the Droid is a good phone. I think that we will upgrade Droid to the software that’s available on Nexus One, and clearly both Peter [Chao of HTC, pictured left] and I compete in the marketplace to deliver the best product we can. And we will deliver some good products subsequent to Nexus One.”
There’s clearly a few missing items from many users’ wish lists that remain unexplored by Nexus One, among them multitouch. Wilthere ever be such a feature on that model, or any future Google model?
With the same blunt, if ineffective, retort that he used two years ago in proclaiming that Google was not, and never would, build a phone, Google’s Andy Rubin replied, “We leave the option open. It’s essentially a software thing. We’ll consider it.” When pressed further, Rubin would only say, “We’ll consider it.”
If Android 2.1, and the versions to follow (which may not be too far from ready), will keep Nexus One on a par with Droid, then just how soon will customers expect something on the order of a “Nexus Two?” More to the point, how soon will such new models render obsolete phones whose users remain locked into two-year contracts, and will there be a big press event somewhere in-between?
The surprising answer from Google may be something Mario Queiroz wishes he could take back: “You’re going to be waiting for a long time if you’re going to wait for the next one.” And in an attempt to clarify, Queiroz added, “If you need a great phone today, the Nexus One is a great phone. That’s what I use as my primary device. There are others out there. It’s a difficult question to answer in that regard.”
Andy Rubin immediately asked questions of his own about the phone purchasing “platform,” perhaps in a desperate effort to change the subject from what the press was leading towards. But it was only a brief distraction, as the very next question from the gallery was more of a rant.
“Google quite famously said you’d never do ‘me, too’ products; that if you do something, you wanted it to be revolutionary and different a fill a need that nobody else is matching,” came the question from the reporter, who didn’t identify himself. “The [Nexus One] phone, the voice input, looks awesome. Everything else, I kinda see that in phones that are out there already. This does not seem to be a huge revolutionary step. So why? Why are you putting all of Google behind this, when I’m getting a phone that can’t support CDMA and GSM at the same time, can’t support AT&T’s 3G network and support T-Mobile’s network? And more importantly, I think the pricing structure: It’s boring, and it seems like every other pricing structure that’s out there. And we’ve had Eric [Schmidt, Google's CEO] in the past say that, ‘Hey, someday you’re going to get an ad-supported mobile phone.’ You guys are the ad kings. So if you’re not going to roll out an ad-supported phone, who the hell’s going to do it? Why are we getting these kinds of pricing structures; why are you not giving away a phone for people for free with ads? I want the revolution from Google; where is it?”
It was the type of tea party demonstration you’d never see at an Apple event. Rubin responded by saying he thought the pricing structure was actually “exciting.” Then he attempted to quell the revolt by saying, “The first thing, before you can revolutionize the world and have all sorts of new options and new services and new features that are primarily — what you’re describing — business models, not technology features, you have to have a mechanism by which you’re selling product. So the first baby step here is, let’s get an online store going, let’s put the best-in-class products through that store, and let’s figure out what the best way to enhance it is, in the future.”
In the services and software field, Google has grown very accustomed to being able to trumpet incremental, granular, and occasionally trivial enhancements to features such as e-mail and map search. But that incremental approach did not translate well to Google’s smartphones (call them what you will), which really needed a first-class send-off rather than something resembling a bake sale in the parking lot of the Dollar General. Nexus One may very well be a classy, functional, powerful something-phone. But we didn’t see that fact proven today — a sign that Google has a very long way to go to become an effective retailer.
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Google Nexus One Finally Goes Live
As expected, Google has unveiled its first smartphone, the Nexus One which it calls a super smartphone, during a press event held in Mountain View, at Google’s Headquarters.
The phone is already available for sale on Google’s dedicated website where prospective customers can get it SIM Free either from Google itself or get it from T-Mobile & Verizon Wireless.
The Nexus One phone is available on the T-Mobile Even More Individual 500 plan together with a two year contract for $180 at a price of $39.99 per month with unlimited night and weekend minutes.
As for Verizon Wireless, the mobile operator will sell it – as a CDMA model – in the US from Spring 2010. Roughly about the same time, UK mobile phone network Vodafone will be selling the Nexus One with Singapore, Hong Kong and other countries following.
Interestingly, Google chose to go Vodafone’s way rather than T-Mobile, its launch partner for the G1. It also kind-of explains why Vodafone dumped the HTC HD2 a few weeks ago without HTC uttering anything. Vodafone will, of course, become the fourth UK mobile operator to sell the iPhone from next month.
Interestingly, Andy Rubin, who joined Google following the acquisition of Danger by the search giant, said that the company would be making a profit right from the sale of the phone and would use it to promote Google’s own solutions.
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Google About To Launch NexusOne Smartphone?
Google is said to be a few hours away from launching its first consumer hardware, an Android-based smartphone called Nexus One, ahead of the forthcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
CES 2010 officially starts on Thursday but observers expect to hear from it formally during a press conference later today. The “Android press gathering” will start at 10am local time (around 8pm UK time tonight) and could also witness the launch of Google first Tablet device as reported yesterday.
The phone has no physical keyboard, comes with a large 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen, is likely to cost around $500 (£312) at launch, is manufactured by HTC and will be sold and marketed only by Google.
There’s also a 5-megapixel camera complete with flash and autofocus, light and proximity sensors, an accelerometer and a removable battery that can reportedly power the Nexus One for 24 hours.
Other rumoured specifications include a card reader, 512MB RAM and 512MB onboard memory. The number of applications in the Android Marketplace is slowly growing as well with more than 16,000 already available.
It will also be the first mobile phone to run the Android OS 2.1 and coupled with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz, Cortex A8-based chipset, is likely to be the fastest mobile phone on the planet.
Expect the announcement to be followed by a flurry of reviews, counter reviews, analysis and commentaries from us.
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