Now that the Nexus One is official I thought it’d be a wonderful time to see whose predictions were spot on and who was under the influence of psychotropic drugs. Since I’ve been making fun of Ashok Kumar from Northeast Securities for a while, let’s take him first:
- October 20, 2009: Ashok told The Street that Google “is working with a smartphone manufacturer to have a Google-branded phone available this year through retailers and not through telcos”. He was right, Google was indeed working with HTC to make a Google branded phone, but the internet sensationalized the whole thing. The G1, the first Android device, is technically a Google branded phone. Any phone actually that sticks to a certain set of rules is allowed to slap the Google logo on the back of the device.
- November 22, 2009: Ashok told Times Online that the Google Phone will offer “unlimited free calls” thanks to the recent Gizmo5 acquisition. That was obviously wrong. He continues and says that the Google Phone “will be built by a third-party supplier, possibly the Taiwanese phone maker HTC, and will incorporate a processor from Qualcomm.” Remember the HTC HD2? That massive, beautiful Windows Mobile 6.5 device using a 1 GHz Qualcomm processor that was announced earlier in November? It doesn’t take a genius to predict that HTC is going to slap Android on a similar device. When Ashok said the Google Phone will have “a large touchscreen display and a processor almost twice as fast as the one powering Apple’s iPhone 3GS”, he was already describing the HTC HD2. He also predicted the device would run on Android Flan, but it’s actually shipping Eclair.
Now what about Tech Crunch?
- November 17, 2009: “One source told us that HTC, a Taiwanese company, is building the new Google phone, but we think that information is incorrect. We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung.” Well that was wrong. Later in the article: “We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January.” That was right.
- November 18, 2009: “The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP driven device. And Google may be lining up at least AT&T to provide those data services for the Google Phone, says one person we spoke with today.” So wrong it isn’t even funny. The Nexus One doesn’t do VoIP out of the box, and it isn’t even being offered with AT&T.
That’s really it, most other sites didn’t create rumours, they just passed around what was already out there. I said there would be no Google Phone, that it would piss off operators and other Android device makers. Has it? It’s too soon to tell. GigaOM says that “my sources are livid at Google’s decision to promote the HTC-built device”. Make no mistake, the Nexus One is a Google Branded phone, but then again so are a lot of other Android powered devices. People out there thought Google was going to design and build their own device, they’re sorely disappointed, but if Google actually went ahead and did that then they would’ve prematurely killed the Android ecosystem.
Either way, I’m bored of the Nexus One already, bring on the Nexus Two.