Google’s online store for Nexus One is gOne

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 22 July 2010 16:28

Your IT - Mobility

Google’s superphone online selling “direct to the public” experiment is finally over, with Google shutting down its Nexus One online store, with continuing sales only available to developers and from carriers in a handful of countries.

Yesterday’s article on the imminent closure of Google’s Nexus One web store in the US http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/mobility/40527-googles-nexus-one-to-shortly-become-nexus-none, has morphed into today’s news that the store closure has actually happened.

Google’s Nexus One site notes that “The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google. For more information on how to purchase the Nexus One, check out our help center.”

While the Nexus One is still on sale, in limited quantities, in Australia, the UK, Europe and South Korea, and despite some indications in March that a Google Nexus Two superphone successor was due, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that the Nexus One superphone was “so successful” that a second didn’t need to be made.

Schmidt’s statement seems to airbrush over the fact that Android OS smartphone manufacturing partners wouldn’t have been too happy that the OS vendor was getting its own branded smartphones onto the market.

Yes, Android OS is “free” and Google has helped its smartphone manufacturing partners with their hardware designs from the start anyway, but unless you’re going to be the only seller of your own hardware and software, as Apple has done with its iPhones and other iDevices, or as Microsoft has done with the Xbox, it’s really not a good idea to go into such direct competition with your partners.

Otherwise we’d be able to buy Intel and Microsoft branded PCs, and while that may still happen, it’s instructive that Google seems to have backed away from the whole idea after initially declaring it would be a revolution.

So, the Nexus One web store is now Nexus gOne, even as some Nexus One models can still find their way into the hands of developers in the US, and retail customers in some countries outside the US.

I’m really much more interested in when I can download the Froyo Android OS 2.2 onto my HTC Desire, dammit. C’mon, Google and HTC, where’s the announcement on that? :-)