Just a few weeks ago Motorola’s Droid, available exclusively on Verizon Wireless, was raising the public’s awareness of Google’s Android mobile operating system. Now Google is preparing to release its own branded handset, the Nexus One.
By all accounts, the new phone, manufactured by HTC but prominently branded as a Google phone, is a “Droid killer.” Describing his brief experience playing with the new phone, Jason Chen of Gizmodo said the Nexus One will “certify (Google) as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it.”
Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, agreed. “For sure, it’s a Droid killer,” he said. “Droid is just a really clunky design in my view.”
A ‘Really Fast Phone’
Two things stand out on the Nexus One, Sterling said: Screen quality and speed. “It has a really big screen, even though the handset itself is not much bigger than a conventional handset,” Sterling said. “And it’s noticeably high-resolution.”
Even more striking, “It’s really, really fast,” Sterling said. In Chen’s testing, the speed difference was most noticeable in loading web pages.
“In loading a web page over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many web-page loads, so it’s indicative of something going on inside with the hardware,” Chen wrote.
While Google’s search business and free online and desktop apps have been consumer-oriented, conventional wisdom has been that Android was a platform play, not a consumer one. So the news that Google will sell its own phone has confused some observers.
‘What the Heck Are They Doing?’
“I’m not sure what to make…
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