Is Google’s Nexus phone worth the hype?

The greatest buzz in geekdom coming into 2010 is the recently launched Nexus One phone by Google. Dubbed the real Google Phone by some, iPhone killer by other (check out the TV commercial by Verizone) and also anti-climax-letdown by others.

So is it worth the hype?

Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, holds the Google Nexus One phone during a news conference at Google headquarters Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2010, in Mountain View, Calif.

CHIP team members have been checking their emails, IMs and faxes. Unfortunately, the good people at Mountain View has forgotten to send the invite to yesterday’s launch. And thus no first hand review to be had and we had to rely on modern-day sleuth technique – Googling…

Let’s get the facts straight:

• The phone is manufactured by the Taiwanese company, HTC
• It’s powered by the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU from Qualcomm
• It uses the same Android 2.1 OS that runs other Android phones
• It’s thin @ 1.15cm and light @ 130 gm
• On the front are four “hardware” buttons (just touch-sensitive spots on the display): back, menu, home, and search
• Navigation device is a trackball that lights up to tell you a message has come in, with different colors to indicate whether it’s an e-mail, text message, or part of a chat.
• Sports voice-recognition software that will transcribe spoken messages if you prefer reading to listening.
• It has a five-megapixel camera and (wee) a flash
• You can buy it from Google’s Online Store
• They’ll ship to UK, Singapore and Hong Kong – unlocked – for US$529
• It featured built in GPS receiver which we assume will integrate well with Google Maps

Now tell me… any of that salivate you enough to take the next AirAsia plane to Singapore and make the order? Aside from the I-must-have-the-latest-gadget geeks, I suspect not many do. I know for a fact that I don’t.

The fact is: this Google Phone is no earth shattering, revolutionary iPhone killer that many have hyped it to be.

Look at this official picture from Google website. What does it reminds you of? Does Palm Pre come to mind?

I’ve nothing against Palm but the fate of the Palm series is not something that you aspire to be. Not if you’re the mighty Cloud King with billions of cash in your war-chest.

It has been said that Google has openly said that the decision to come out with its own Google Phone is largely down to an anti-Apple strategy. For all the resources that they command, is this all they can do? The stock market took note: Google stock dropped slightly after the announcement today. Apple’s stock went down slightly as the hour of Google’s announcement approached, but then recovered.

But then again – Google has always been a software company and not much of a hardware manufacturer. So I suspect that they have not really put in as much resources into it as they could have.

In light of their ongoing search-engine and online-apps running battle with Microsoft, this new battle in the mobile industry must be part of a bigger overall strategy. What i will call the “Our banner-ads kingdom will not last forever, look for new sources of income” strategy.

After the veil was lifted last Tuesday, many has noted that the revolutionary part of the Google Phone is not the phone itself – but the decision by Google to go into retail and sell the phone itself. As was captured by a post in Arstechnica:

The real news at Google’s event this morning—news that could shake up the mobile industry just as thoroughly as the original iPhone announcement—wasn’t a phone at all, but a URL: http://google.com/phone. An online storefront that, if successful, could knock one of the major pillars out the current, much-reviled US carrier model and result in faster, cheaper, more flexible service for mobile users….

By offering a lineup of phones that is essentially carrier-independent (with the radio compatibility caveat), Google has separated the two previously interlocked parts of the phone/plan-buying experience—phone selection and carrier selection—and has done so in a way that threatens one of the most important enablers of carrier lock-in….In short, what Google announced today wasn’t just the Nexus One, but the world’s first carrier-independent smartphone store.

This sentiment is echoed by Good Morning Silicon Valley:

No single device is going to “kill” the iPhone, and that’s not really Google’s intent anyway, iPhone users being the heavy Web traffickers that they are. But Google does have a strong interest in fostering enough competition to keep Apple from dominating the mobile market, which is why it chose the strategy it did — providing a strong and improving platform that could support multiple manufacturers offering multiple models to multiple demographic segments across multiple carriers. Google doesn’t need to tear down the iPhone; it just needs to make sure there are plenty of attractive alternatives for smartphone shoppers who for various reasons don’t feel compelled to join the Apple-AT&T axis. As an Android flagship, unlocked but initially aligned with T-Mobile, the Nexus One fits as part of that plan.

It’s still early days. Reports have came out from lucky-testers in USA that have generally said that the Nexus One is ‘better than other Android phones’ buy have come out short of saying ‘this is better than an iPhone’.

I believe the real trick will be in the roll-out of 3rd party application developers. There are millions of iPhone apps available at AppleStore compared to 17,000+ apps so far available on Android platform.

Until one unit magically lands itself on my desk… not much I can say about user experience. Hopefully the day will come soon… eh So, I sneaked a visit to the Google phone store and was warmly greeted by the message ‘Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country.‘.