It comes as no surprise that Google’s experiment in phone sales went poorly. It was so bad that the company will be shutting down its Nexus One storefront. Here’s the word from the official Google blog:

While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not. It’s remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it’s clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to chose from.

Yeah, no kidding. I’m not sure why no one spoke up and said this at the meetings that must have happened before the phone launched. If anyone at Google thought Verizon or T-Mobile or Sprint or, well, any carrier would actually want to give up control over phone sales and contract pricing they should be beaten about the head with a sock full of Nexus Ones.

The new plan? Sell phones like everyone else.

The Nexus One has been a mixed bag for Android users. A lot of people really seem to love it. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s Steve Wozniak, called it his favorite gadget earlier this year. That’s awfully high praise coming from such a prominent Apple figure. For others, though, it’s been an unending mess of bug problems without any fixes. There have been display problems, software problems, hardware malfunctions, and the notorious 3G issues in which the Nexus One can’t seem to hold a 3G connection.

Well guess what – it’s not being fixed. That’s correct. The official Google stance is sorry, but you’re screwed. Here it is in geek speak:

I’ve seen some recent speculation on this thread about an OTA to improve 3G connectivity and I want to give you an update on the situation.

While we are continuing to monitor user feedback regarding the 3G performance on the Nexus One, we are no longer investigating further engineering improvements at this time.

If you are still experiencing 3G issues, we recommend that you try changing your location or even the orientation of your phone, as this may help in areas with weaker coverage.

That’s from the official Google support forums. It’s amazing that they’ll market and sell a smartphone to a bunch of nerds and then ask if anyone had thought of moving to improve reception. Wow.

It’s funny how one success story can send the world into a frenzy. The iPhone has been an undisputed success, gobbling up market share by the full percentage point. It’s not unstoppable, though. As the latest comScore stats show, actually, sales growth is nearly nonexistent.

Let’s start with the good news, though. Apple is sitting at 25% market share – an incredible number for such a young presence in the market. This is the number that had everyone scared. The bad news for Apple is that it has stopped growing. Relative to the market, the last three months have only been up .3% for Apple. Compare that to RIM who’s up 1.7% on its 41.3% market share in October of last year. Android more than doubled in the last three months, granted only from 2.8% to 7.1% but that is still massive growth.

Part of the problem is no doubt that Apple has conditioned the world to believe every summer will bring a new iPhone. If that’s not the case in 2010, we might see some very stagnant iPhone numbers before year’s end.

Source: comScore

Part of the hullabaloo surrounding Apple’s recent litigation against HTC was that it supposedly came with little warning. That would have left HTC without much time to find suitable workarounds for the infringements in question, if it actually wasn’t warned in the first place. According to Oppenheimer’s Yair Reiner, Apple did warn handset makers that it would be much stricter with regard to IP violations in the new year.

“Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level discussions with tier-1 handset makers to underscore its growing displeasure at seeing its iPhone-related IP [intellectual property] infringed. The lawsuit filed against HTC thus appears to be Apple’s way of putting a public, lawyered-up exclamation point on a series of blunt conversations that have been occurring behind closed doors,” Reiner wrote in a report on the matter. If he’s to be believe, HTC may be the first in a string of suits that could lead to lucrative licensing deals for several of Apple’s technologies.

Source: CNN

You don’t have to be an iPhone developer to make a bunch of money from mobile applications. Take Edward Kim’s Car Locator. The free version of the app has been downloaded 70,000 times, while nearly 7,000 have picked up the paid version. Total revenue? How bout $13,000 a month.

Sure, it’s not the millions you’ve heard about in the App Store, but Kim has just one among a couple hundred “top” applications that are likely grossing at least as much as his if not more. The app had always done well, but it really took off when it was added to the featured list on the Android Marketplace. “it was netting an average of about $80 – $100/day,” Kim wrote on his blog, “until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day.”

Almost $800 for something that probably didn’t take all that long to code? Why do I write again?

Source: Eddie Kim

Take a look at that phone. It’s like the Nexus One, right? Just prettier. That UI looks great. And is that an optical trackball I see? This is the HTC Desire, the Nexus One’s smoking hot younger sister. It seems a bit strange that HTC would enter a contract with Google, build the Nexus One, and then release a better phone just a couple weeks later. It’s a trend that’s happening often with Android phones, and I think it’s starting to hurt the platform.

Consider the Droid. It was, at the time, the best Android phone to date. It looked great, pioneered Android 2.0, and debuted on America’s favorite network. By all accounts, Droid owners should have been very happy people. That is, until the Nexus One rolled into town. It had a newer version of Android, a better hardware interface, and it did away with that hideous physical keyboard. Unfortunately, a lot of Android fans had already flocked to the Droid to show their Google support. It’s a big problem in the US, where most consumers lock into contracts for subsidized hardware prices. The Nexus One released with lackluster sales.

Now this. There is no official word on a US release, but it’s headed for Asia in April and likely stateside shortly after. As pretty as this phone is, and as great as the Sense UI may be, I’d bet we’ll see some underwhelming sales numbers. If people didn’t buy the Android, they almost certainly picked up the Nexus One. Anyone that’s left is there by mere happenstance – an unwillingness to pay a disconnect fee a few months early, perhaps. This could be the best phone in the world, but the pace of Android hardware release will turn it into an anecdote.

Apple has been prone to the same thing in the past. If you ever bought an iPod you know it was playing second fiddle in just a few months. It’s something Cupertino got right with the iPhone, though. Even though there have been several iterations, Apple has kept its mouth shut about the product until just days before launch, giving it time to offload some of the older hardware before the newest version launches. Does it piss some people off? Sure. But much less so than watching new hardware roll out every month or two or getting an announcement of new hardware on the same schedule.

Yes, that is Linus Torvalds in a Speedo. And yes, he got naked because he’s so excited about the Nexus One (that’s how I imagine things happening, anyway).

Actually, Torvalds just picked up a Nexus One. He’s notorious for his criticism of any and every cell phone, but he seems to love the Nexus One, so much he was willing to call it “a winner.” He doesn’t like that it’s a fun, rather that it has pinch-to-zoom capability and some GPS. Here’s what he said in his blog post:

I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody – now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the phone runs Linux. Official Nexus One sales: 80,001.

The world’s first self-titled “superphone” isn’t posting super sales. Frankly, the numbers are terrible. Embarrassing. Worse than I ever would have expected. The Nexus One has only sold 80,000 units in its first month.

It’s hard to say where the problem lies. Sure, the phone wasn’t marketed very well, and what efforts were made were aimed a demographic that likely already has their smartphone of choice. It also launched shortly after the Droid, so Android fans had just picked up a new phone. There’s also the fact that it was being subsidized by T-Mobile, which just doesn’t have the kind of support Verizon’s got.

Whatever the reason, I was surprised by the number. The iPhone, by comparison, sold 600,000 units in its first month. The Droid sold 525,000.

Source: Wall Street Journal

I’m always a little put off by profanity filters. They are increasingly built into video games and seem to find their ways into all sorts of other applications. What I didn’t expect was a filter on a cell phone, and then Google did it.

Yes, the Nexus One has a profanity filter as a part of its speech-to-text engine. At first I was pretty surprised. It seems mighty presbyterian of Google to pull something like that without talking about it. The real reason, though, makes a lot of sense.

We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent.

So instead of something nasty when your four-year-old says ‘duck,’ all he’ll see is ‘####.’ Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to disable the feature, so you’ll have to write out that drunken text instead of just yelling it into your phone.

This render of what’s been called the Motorola Shadow has been making the rounds over the weekend. You’ll notice it looks a whole lot like a Droid, just in white and with an added wriststrap. By some accounts it’s the successor to the Droid – a thinner, less evil-looking version of Verizon’s flagship Android device. There is another option, though.

Some are calling this the next Google Phone – the Nexus Two, maybe? I’d call that a very remote possibility, judging by the design of the device and the fact that it isn’t made by HTC. It seems odd that Google would abandon the manufacturer so shortly after it turned out a phone with solid critical reviews, despite Google’s retail problems.

If anything, I’m going to bet on a different market. It’s a decent looking phone, but I really wouldn’t want that wriststrap hanging out in my pocket. I guess I should wear it on my wrist?

Source: Engadget

This is exactly why I love Steve Wozniak. Just when you think he’s slipped, stepped over the line and said too much, he comes in and totally redeems himself. Here’s a comment he left over at Gizmodo about the Nexus One incident:

“Actually, everyone got it wrong. My favorite phones are my iPhones. When asked what my favorite gadgets were I took it to mean new gadgets I was playing with (that I considered good). I am not a switcher but I’m not going to tell people that the Nexus One is not a good gadget. Same for the Droid. I continually buy and play with new hot gadgets because I gets asked about them all the time. I have had prior Android phones that I didn’t consider good. I usually have between 2 and 6 different cell phones on me, more when there are interesting product introductions.

I try mainly to make good comments but I’m honest about flaws too. I don’t get into arguments trying to claim that there are objective reasons that make one person’s phone better than another’s. It’s subjective. You can’t win such arguments, only have a stressful life doing so. I have no problem praising and learning from non-Apple products as well as Apple products, when they are good.”

Your honesty…it is disarming. Seriously, all you CEO hacks who just ooze yes-man every time you talk, please read this. Then keep reading it until it sinks in.

Steve Wozniak is known for being a little eccentric, but he’s so much like a big, nerdy teddy bear that it’s hard not to like the guy. He’s also one of few corporate faces that will drop the marketing schtick and admit where his company has gone wrong. Most recently, he told NBC that his favorite gadget isn’t the iPhone, it’s the Nexus One.

It’s a strange thing to admit to someone like NBC, who will take that story and run in any direction that will get attention. He did say, though, that he hasn’t ditched his iPhone. The Apple product is still his cellphone of choice. My guess is he likes that Android is a little more open, that it doesn’t restrict extremely tech-savvy people like himself from doing what they want with the phone. He’s often criticized the iPhone for it’s rigid user interface.

Whatever the reason, you can bet there’s an Apple fanboy weeping somewhere at the news.

Source: NBC

The latest in a string of consumer disappointments around Google’s Nexus One involves stacking early termination fees on top of one another. As several customers have noticed, canceling your Nexus One service after the 14-day trial period and before 120 days has passed results in what Google calls an Equipment Recovery Fee of $350.

That’s in addition to any carrier fees in place. For T-Mobile that’s another $200. That’s $550 in fees plus the $180 you paid for the phone. The lesson? Buy the thing outright if you’re interested but unsure. It’ll run you $530, will come unlocked, and you can resell it yourself and recoup most of your losses.

You also have to wonder where that money is going. In most carrier partnerships, it’s the carrier that subsidizes the cost of the phone, hence the egregious ETF. Here, though, Google is the retailer, so presumably it subsidizes the cost itself. Why the T-Mobile fee? And if for some reason T-Mobile is covering consumer costs, why Google? Whatever the case, it ends poorly for consumers.

Shortly after the announcement of the Google Nexus One, BillShrink put together one of those nifty little charts as a cost comparison for the “next generation of smartphones.” (I’m glad to see it didn’t adopt Google’s new term: superphone.) The results read like yet another reason the iPhone needs to get off AT&T.

The cost of ownership for a top tier plan on the iPhone runs $3,799 over the course of your two year contract. The Nexus One, by comparison, is just $2,579, and that’s without the 5GB data cap. It’s an ugly stat for AT&T, which doesn’t even compete when you step down to an average plan. The total cost is still $500 more than the Nexus One.

The chart also throws in the Palm Pre and Verizon’s Motorola Droid, but now that the Nexus One is out I think we can pretty much forget about the droid. And the Pre? What’s that again?

Source: BillShrink

Today marked 2010’s first major tech release: the Google Nexus One. Google’s calling it a superphone, that special sub-category of smartphones that can do things like posting video to YouTube and run voice recognition software. I dunno, sounds like every other smartphone to me, though this one does look a good bit faster.

If you were hoping for a revelation, keep on hoping. While the Nexus One is definitely the best Android phone I’ve seen, it falls in line with the evolution of smartphones to this point. Yes, it is faster. That Snapdragon processor will be the envy of every iPhone owner, including myself. Yes, it is small. I was actually surprised to see that HTC was able to keep it thinner than a No. 2 pencil considering the processor. It will be interesting to see how hot it gets. And yes, above all, it is pretty. Android 2.1 looks really spectacular on that AMOLED screen. It’s got a big camera with an LED flash, another thing that will make the iPhone fans whimper.

Other than that, the world remains the same. Android app support still hasn’t caught up with the iPhone, and you can only get a 3G data connection on T-Mobile, the same one-network limitation the iPhone has. The one big difference is that it is possible to get the phone off contract, though in the US I doubt we’ll see many people going that route.

Head over to Google’s official webpage for all the spec info you need and a nice tour of the phone’s features.

Earlier this weekend, tweets started showing up from Google employees about a new phone. The new phone. The Google Phone. I wrote about it last month, based on a report from TechCrunch that claimed we’d see it in early 2010. Google has given the phone, which is made by HTC, to wide array of workers to field test it, or as the Google blog calls it, dogfooding.

From what few pics are available, the phone looks great. It’s got a sizable OLED screen, runs on a Snapdragon, and thankfully has no hardware keyboard. I’m not just excited about the hardware, though. Google has designed the entire experience here, something I’ve waited for them to do since Android launched. Sure, they’ve contributed on the UI for the G1 and the Droid, but this is the whole package, all from Google. They’ll be selling the device directly as an unlocked GSM device. That means T-Mobile or AT&T, to be released some time in early (likely January) 2010.

One of the earliest tweets says this: “Google Phone = iPhone + a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android.” Is this really comparable to the iPhone, or is it something completely different?

Yesterday I wrote a post about the Android explosion and the problems facing developers because there are so many different Android phones. Basically there is so much different hardware out there that developers have to spend time debugging instead of creating new features/apps. Today brings news of the one phone to rule them all, one phone to find them, one phone to bring them all, and crush their pathetic features under the full weight of Google R&D.

I’m talking about the Google phone, a phone that has been rumored for months. Really, Android has been waiting for a flagship device. I thought the Droid was it at first, but pointless features like that crap keyboard made me think otherwise. Michael Arrington and the crew at TechCrunch seem to have the inside scoop on the phone, and they’ve been kind enough to share.

The phone is basically Google’s vision of the perfect Android phone. As for features, there’s really not much to say other than that. From the sound of things it’s coming soon – think early 2010 – and will be sold both directly and through retailers. From the sound of things, it’ll be built by either Samsung or LG, though Arrington thinks it’ll be LG because Samsung already makes parts for the iPhone.

The phone would bring up the issue of competing with customers for Google. Making its own phone means other manufacturers will be going head-to-head with the company that makes the software. A recent update suggests the Google phone might be designed for data-only voice connections, which might assuage some of those concerns. It would still require a carrier – TechCrunch’s source says Google is considering AT&T for now – but calls would only be made over a data connection.

If nothing else, I’d be interested to see what Google considers the ideal Android phone. The Droid was good, but too many features felt like an afterthought.

Source: TechCrunch (first article / second article)

Remember that free Photoshop app for the iPhone? Adobe’s finally released a version for Android, roughly a month after the iPhone version became available.

It’s basically the same app, though with a few differences for both better and worse. For starters, the Android version displays the phone’s entire photo library within the application. With the iPhone version you have to go through an extra step to select your photo. Not a huge difference, but it’s nice.

On the flipside, the Android version doesn’t have the pinch or twist functionality for straightening out your pictures. The feature is still there, just as a menu item instead of the multitouch. Again, not a big deal, and frankly the Photoshop app probably won’t be the pivotal factor if you’re deciding between the two platforms. For either OS, it’s a nice app.

I’ve been cautiously skeptical about Google’s Android operating system as a successful mobile platform. I love the features, I love the UI, but the phones were seriously lacking. Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some comments during the company’s earnings conference call that may change my mind, though.

Schmidt says Android Adoption is set to blow up, and it’s because of those crappy phones the system currently runs. It’s not the phones themselves, but the number of them. There are currently 12 phones running Android, and more phones and netbooks coming out monthly it seems. As that number continues to grow, it gives developers more and more reason to spend time on the platform.

Mobile is Google’s next great frontier, and where analysts expect most of the company’s growth to come from over the next couple years. With more Android adoption, that growth is essentially guaranteed. Hopefully 2010 will see the release of a phone that might make me consider getting rid of the iPhone. I love a healthy competition.