OMGoogle! Nexus One released, but is it the Nesux One instead?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 06 January 2010 04:25

Opinion and Analysis

The Nexus One has ceased being mere “dogfood” and has emerged at long last following a month of hype that never quite reached the iHeights that Google’s crunchiest of competitors managed to whip up, but after seeing the barely-better-than-iPhone specs, one can only ask “is that it?!”

Oh dear. After a month of endless hype, leaked specs and YouTube videos, a full Engadget review and more opinion that you can poke a pundit at, the Google Nexus One phone has launched at last.

Full details are at Google.com/Phone, where Australians are non-helpfully told that the Nexus One isn’t yet available in this country.

Looking through the specs, we can see that the Nexus has a stack of iPhone-beating features that, on paper, smash elements of the iPhone into smithereens, but it’s a story we’ve heard before over and over again.

When? Well, ever since mp3 makers thought adding an FM radio (or other features not built into iPods) to their iPod-clones would steal iPod purchases, and ever since phone manufacturers tried making iPhone killers that did little but kill the notion that anyone would ever truly make an iPhone killer, or “eviscerator” as the Engadgeteers so cleverly put it.

As the world inexorably and initially nebulously lurched towards the launching of the Nexus One, all the details of the phone, which Google is cheekily calling a “superphone” instead of the Jesus Nexus, were leaked, thus ensuring zero surprises today, on launch day.

But all we really have is an Android OS based phone that represents what the very first Google phone should have been in the first place. Where’s the revolution that the iPhone delivered back in 2007?

It’s still in 2007, from where Google is heavily borrowing despite some offering some great high-end features and capabilities.

These include has a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, a trackball that lights up, a fast 1GHz processor, a 5 megapixel camera, video recording, 20,000-or-so apps, voice controlled GPS, speech recognition letting you use your voice to "type" text into any app and much more, but it’s clearly an iPhone wannabe, and not the hoped for iPhone killer.

There’s still no multitouch, despite the Nexus technically being perfectly capable of such a feature, and according to one report I’ve read online at PC World one Googler said the Nexus was designed in close partnership with HTC, while another Googler says HTC did all the work!

For a company whose mission it is to organise the world's information, it's a shame they can't organise a straight story on this important element.

I don’t know about the Nexus One. It’s a great smartphone, but it’s just an iPhone wannabe, and if I’ve already got the real Jesus Phone, the Jesus Nexus just ain’t doing it for me.

After all the hoopla and hype, I’ll keep my iPhone thanks very much, and see what Google can do with its future Nexus Two.