After an hour of the much-hyped presentation of the Nexus One, here’s what we didn’t know two weeks ago that we know now:
* There’s going to be a Verizon version before long.
* It accepts voice input in text fields.
That’s it. That’s it and that’s all. Everything else – name, specs, pricing plans on T-Mobile – was known before we broke for Christmas.
For all their talk about the “revolutionary sales model,” I don’t see what’s so different about the selling system from what Apple did in 2007 with the iPhone, except for selling it unlocked – which means that you can pay $530 to use it on AT&T with no 3G service available. Which is kind of ridiculous – if Apple got skewered for having a phone with no 3G on AT&T in 2007, how useful is one going to be in 2010?
The practical upshot of today was ‘we have a GSM phone running Android 2.’ Which is great news, as it goes, but nothing that’s going to blow people away. It will be interesting to see if they get the same sort of backlash we’ve come to expect from Apple paste-eaters every time they fail to deliver the iGasm 4G with 1080p video, a 15-hour battery and instant on-demand transformation into Beyonce.