Less than a year ago, Google had announced its entry into the mobile devices hardware market with its launch of Nexus One. Right after the launch they used their muscle power in the advertising space to show the Nexus One phone in front of every single person. It appears that the customers have shown their muscle power and reminded Google as to who the final decision maker on this market is.

Nexus One sales have been extremely poor with Apple just ruling the market both in the mobile phone segment with their iPhone and also introducing iPad, which has been selling like hot cakes.

Google has followed one of the good fundamentals of business which is to identify losses as early as possible and stop further losses. With the discontinuing of the mobile hardware division, Google can now focus on the mobile software division, where their support of Android is catching up well with the iPhone apps on mobile devices.

A huge advantage that Google has over iPhone in the mobile software market is that they can have their apps visible on unlimited number of devices, as long as the device is ready to adopt the Android mobile operating system. This power will lead to a natural evolution process, which defines that certain effects cannot be stopped by any force, as the need is much stronger. With iPhone apps stuck to devices that are propreitory to Apple, Android apps will overtake them in just a matter of time – unless Apple does something drastic to disrupt the cause – ie ease of adoption of good apps on multiple devices.

Google’s Vik, who is one of the most popular strategists in Google, is now heading the mobile apps division and that shows the amount of seriousness that Google is showing on this.

With the fact that mobile devices are going to be the primary device of choice globally, it is no surprise that everyone is rushing to get the biggest piece of the pie. Though Microsoft is way behind in the online world, it will be interesting to see how they react to such a move from Google.

(Image from Google Website. Link to the official Google website for Nexus One phone with full specifications at the end of this post).

This phone has very good features, but the one feature that attracted me the most was its ability to convert speech to text and help send emails, updates on social networking sites, etc, ie. allow users to just speak and help in converting the speech into right text. Many other firms including Microsoft has attempted this in the past, without much success.

It will be very interesting to see how Google comes up with this attempt.

Another very interesting differentiating factor is that Nexus One will allow multiple applications to be published on the phone, while iPhone has a single iPhone store, which is used as the central place where all applications have to be published and also downloaded from. This level of freedom in the Nexus One might well be the equivalent of how Facebook revolutionised the social media platform where they allowed developers to write applications on Facebook platform and publish it – a new approach which was not very common with social networks before that.

An interesting point to note about Nexus One is that this phone is not fully tied to any service provider. iPhone was tied just with AT&T, thus helping Apple to keep the costs low and at the same time allow the service provider to absorb the costs. In this model, Google is providing various options such as buying the phone as it is for a full cost. Another option is to buy it with T-Mobile as the service provider, at a discounted price when we accept a two year contract. Google’s website also says that this device will also be available with Verizon in the near future in the US, and also with Vodafone in the Europe in the near future.

Earlier there were speculations that the phone might be sold at a discounted rate, while part of the cost of the phone might be recovered by showing relevant ads on the phone – since Google has mastered this already on the web. From the announcement today, it is clear that Google has decided not to take that approach with this phone so far.

The good news is that with such good concepts, the quality of mobile phones and their offerings will grow, thus benefitting the consumer as they win at the end of this, with more features helping them with what they are expecting their phones to do.

As we all know, the key difference between Google and Apple is that while Apple launches very limited number of products and they have pretty much had close to 100% success in all their products in the last few years (eg. ipod, iphone, ipod touch, etc), Google has the pattern of releasing applications and products in bulk, out of which there is around 50% success ratio. Lets hope that the Next One phone is one of those success stories from Google.

The most important take away for Auro Infotech team in this is the fact that very soon in the near future, we are going to see the need for developing applications for this phone. We will start working on studying the APIs as soon as they are ready and update our readers here on this blog on the progress of the same.

Btw, if you are interesting in knowing about the features of Nexus One, please click this link below:
Google Nexus One Phone http://www.google.com/phone