iSuppli recently did a teardown for the HTC Droid Incredible, and has come out and said that the device could be the Nexus Two because the components to make the device are so similar. We get the point iSuppli is trying to make, but it just doesn’t sit right with us. The HTC Incredible may have a component and material cost that’s similar to the Nexus One, but it certainly isn’t the Nexus Two. Nevermind, that Google has already come out and said that there will be no Nexus Two followup to the original Nexus One, which was, of course, made by HTC.
A successor of a device is a decent upgrade, not just a couple extra megapixels in the camera, a couple GBs of extra internal memory, and a different navigation implementation (trackball vs optical trackpad). To call the Droid Incredible a handset that could have been the Nexus Two is inaccurate at best and just plain misleading at worst.
The Droid Incredible could have been dubbed the ‘Nexus Two’ given its similarity to HTC’s Nexus One introduced early this year,” observed Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst and teardown services manager for iSuppli. “Indeed, the phones are very similar in terms of costs and features, with the main difference being the Incredible’s support for the CDMA air standard used by carrier Verizon in the United States.”
For Google, the Nexus One had only a few purposes. One was to obviously get Android into more hands, and the other was to provide a guideline of what a high-end Android phone should be so manufacturers would follow suit. It worked. We started to see manufacturers coming out with devices that met every spec of the Nexus One, and slightly exceeded it in some ways. These small upgrades to the base specs of the Nexus One would not make any of these new devices a Nexus Two. If anything, it would make the devices a variant of the Nexus One. Furthermore, if there were a Nexus Two, it wouldn’t have a custom Android skin running on atop. To be fair, though, iSuppli says nothing about the Incredible’s UI being related to its possible status as a Nexus Two device.
Google raised the bar for manufacturers so they would stop bringing sub-par devices to market when the technologies to make them better were there. Manufactures stepped up their game, and started making better devices. The only thing reason Google would make a Nexus Two is if manufactures kept making smartphones with 600MHz processors, limited RAM and other limited features.
Smartphones like the Droid X and EVO could have been dubbed a Nexus Two, since their upgrades included a bigger display, HDMI-out capabilities, and other, significant hardware upgrades. Still, I have yet to see a phone released today to make me want to leave the Nexus One for good.
I see what iSuppli was trying to say, it just didn’t sit right with my geeky brain. A Nexus Two would sport top of the line upgrades, from type of display, CPU/GPU capabilities, increased ROM/RAM, TV-Out option, upgraded cameras, and other high-end features without a customized skin that would slow future updates to the device, no matter how sexy it is. All of those features would constitute as an upgrade, not just one or two.
I could go on, but this is the end of my rant.
[Via: iSuppli]