Was Nexus One Just a Google style Android Launch Vehicle?

2 Jul 2010 by Graham Lyons - News Android, Eric Schmidt, google, nexus one 2 Comments »

All the hullabaloo emanating from the iPhone seems to mask the successes of the other mega-phones in the market. The bubble of 'cool' that not only encapsulates Apple's devices but also defines their soul-achingly trendy stores, means that the simple effectiveness and feature-sets from their rivals, fail to generate the type of ripples that Apple's black-turtle-neck wearing launch dive-bombs create.

But their rivals most certainly are popular – we've talked previously about the 160,000 Android devices sold every day – and with this success you would have thought that Google's own Android device, the HTC made Nexus One, would have a secure future. However, you would be wrong.

Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt

In a typically forthright interview with The Telegraph, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about a number of different topics; from the apparent multi-pronged nature of Google's interests, to how they view their differences with their fruit-based rival:

“The difference between the Apple model and the Google model is easy to understand – they're completely different. The Google model is completely open. You can basically take the software – it's free – you can modify whatever you want, you can add any kind of app, you can build any kind of business model on top of it and you can add any kind of hardware. The Apple model is the inverse.”

Ouch.

One of the headline points from this interview must be the news that Google's wonder-phone, the Nexus One, looks set to become a cellular flash-in-the-pan:

“The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn't have to do a second one. We would view that as positive but people criticised us heavily for that. I called up the board and said: 'Ok, it worked. Congratulations – we're stopping'. We like that flexibility, we think that flexibility is characteristic of nimbleness at our scale”

So its success seems to have been rewarded with the projects cancellation – The 'Google Phone' will become no more. Surely this begs the question whether if it hadn't had been successful we'd have seen a Nexus Two…

Though it's difficult not to think that this was the plan all along. Surely with Google using the Nexus One to promote and demonstrate their Android mobile phone platform, the likelihood of other companies wanting to compete with Google on their own turf would have negatively impacted Androids popularity with other manufactures. The Nexus One seems to have been a technology demo that people could buy, a gutsy kick-start to Androids mobile aspirations.

..The full interview is on Telegraph.co.uk and is a great insight into the mind of one of the internet's most powerful figures.