At last it is out in the open – Google finally launched its Nexus One handset a few hours ago. And while most of the tech world has responded with enthusiasm, one can just about hear the traces of disappointment out there.
Blame it on Apple, but we have been a tad spoilt by surprises hitting us on the day a product is released. In each of the three iPhones, people had a fair idea of what was going to be released, but every time Apple managed to pull a rabbit out of its hat, whether it was the App Store on the 3G or the sensational video recording and editing options on the 3GS.
Google, alas, have not quite done
that with the Nexus One. The specs of the phone had been all over the Internet days before its launch. And every word spoken at its launch seemed to confirm what we had heard earlier. We kept waiting for a bunny to emerge from the headgear, but no luck. Don’t get us wrong – we think the Nexus One is a darned reliable phone. Heck, anything with a 3.7 inch AMOLED screen, a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM and ROM, a 5.0-megapixel camera – all wrapped loving around the latest version of Android (2.1), would be a winner. We love the option to be able to speak out mails and texts – no one truly likes onscreen keyboards. Google has a lovely bouquet of apps on the phone. And the Android Market is sure the best place to get apps after the App Store.
But the problem is that this is the Google phone. Or make that THE GOOGLE PHONE. Pardon us, but we did expect something a bit more – actually a lot more – than a heavily specced baby. The phone will do well, but we doubt if it will have the kind of impact the iPhone or the BlackBerry did on the phone industry. And that is bit of a let-down, as it comes from the company that seems to revel in redefining standards. Google changed mail, chat, online office suites, and heck, even mobile operating systems…why, oh why, scream the faithful, did they not do more with their phone? It speaks volumes of the device that most people are more interested in how Google will distribute it, than how it will perform.
From any other company, the Nexus One would have been an awe-inspiring phone. From Google, it just seems a tad underwhelming.
Blame it on us. Like Pip in Dickens’ classic, we had Great Expectations.
Unlike India carriers dictate terms in the US. Nexus One is one of the only few nextgen smartphones that are offered with no contract, ofcourse that means a hefts $500 price but its a beginning of a revolution there. If you see the Nexus One as a iPhone Killer, in many ways it is!
services like ebay, best buy and amazon have been selling the ‘non-contract’ phones (specially the unlocked iPhones) from a long time now. which means that google adopting the non-contract sale format is nothing new in itself. Our mindsets for Google are so high, that we keep finding ‘innovation’ in everything that google offers. I didn’t see anything new in the nexus-one and thats just because i keep expecting a lot from google.