Well, that didn’t take long – after less than seven months, the Nexus One has been discontinued. The first – and to date, only – mobile phone that came close to wooing me from the iPhone is no more. Was that fast? I thought that was fast.
The charitable explanation is that the Nexus One was never meant to be a large-scale consumer product: it was designed as a proof of concept, to show what Android could do with the right hardware platform, and meant to spur other manufacturers on to better products. As an aside, being an unlocked phone, it made a great developer tool or just geek toy.
The problem was multifold:
1) The phone was only available online, and for the most part unsubsidized. Which means $530 up front for a phone you could only physically gauge by putting your hand up to a Flash app on the site. No typical consumer who doesn’t suffer form brain damage is going to go that route when every other phone on the market can be physically held and toyed around with at a cell store, or Apple store, or Best Buy, or Radio Shack, or…
2) The phone wasn’t carrier-subsidized. The upper limit on a smartphone seems to be $299 for all the bells and whistles, $199 for the mainstream variety. Asking almost double that is the height of foolishness, especially when…
3) Frequency lock-in means that you could only use the phone on T-Mobile. Oh, you could put it on AT&T, but you’d have no 3G coverage, since AT&T doesn’t operate in 1700 Mhz. And since T-Mobile’s 3G only works in that band, you could buy the AT&T version but be stuck there unless you were willing to go EDGE-only on T-Mobile. And AT&T’s rates per month are the same whether you bring your own phone or not – hell, even when you’re out of contract. Verizon and Sprint are right out – good luck going to them with a phone you don’t buy from them.
4) They barely advertised the damn thing. I saw ads on websites, but that’s about it. And really, Google doesn’t care about selling the Nexus One any more than Cisco cares about selling the Flip camera – it’s a sideline to help spur people to consume the company’s REAL offering – advertising in Google’s case, bandwidth in Cisco’s. Compare to Apple, whose main line of interest is in making you buy the device itself; things like the iTunes Music Store or App Store are nice, but those are to help facilitate and encourage the purchase of iTems, first and foremost.
Well, that’s made one bit of my life easier. If there’s not going to be an unlocked Nexus One, there’s precious little to be gained for me by switching my entire underlying infrastructure. As with so many things in my life, I ended up making the right decision through no fault of my own.
(An aside, leading up to the next post: how loud would the outrage had been if Apple had cancelled its flagship phone model after only seven months?)