Nexus One vs. iPhone 3G S

Google released their mobile phone the Nexus One yesterday. Let’s ignore the “super-smartphone” marketing-speak and try to look at it as what it claims to be: an iPhone-killer.

On paper the Nexus One looks like it is the real deal:

• Same size as iPhone: slightly taller but slightly thinner as well and slightly lighter
• Slightly bigger screen with more than double iPhone’s resolution
• Higher resolution camera with DVD-like video recording capability
• All mobile radio technologies from UMTS to stereo Bluetooth on-board
• Similar claimed battery life as iPhone
• Processor based on the same Arm design as iPhone but at a faster clock speed: 1GHz compared to iPhone 3G S’s 667MHz)
• Twice the RAM (512MB) as iPhone 3G S
• Similar amount of storage, but removable instead of fixed.

Nexus One seems to at least match if not surpass iPhone on all relevant hardware specs.

It seems to me, though, that the real difference between the iPhone and Nexus One is not going to be the hardware specs, but rather the user experience and 3rd party software. On paper there are also some cool user experience features that such as street navigation that the iPhone cannot match without some expensive software.

I did not get my hands on a Nexus One yet but from what I have seen, it appears that the user interface is not as polished or as unified as on the iPhone. But the predictive the on-screen keyboard with multiple suggestions seems to be an awesome idea. However the user experience flies or falls by the actual hands-on experience. So the jury is still out on this…

It can be claimed that the success of iPhone was closely related to the availability of a large selection of high quality third party software with a huge number of ready customers over the iTunes Store architecture. However you can also turn the last sentence on its head an claim that the flood of third party software was caused by the immense success of the iPhone as a gadget and the promise of an easy-buck to be made over an established and exclusive distribution channel to millions of customers. There was no app store, when Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone almost three years ago, after all.

Experience has shown that the get-rich-quick-by-selling-a-million-99-cent-apps model worked more like a lottery when the iPhone platform was new. But as the platform matures, the market weeds itself out and the serious developers remain to develop more sophisticated apps.

Obviously, Google does not have anything as wide-spread as iTunes for the distribution of 3rd party software. However the Android platform also does not have a draconian software review process for the third party software. Thus, the developers can distribute their own software over traditional means. What remains to be seen is, how successful this ecosystems is going to be in attracting developers and generating high quality, easy to use software.

Overall, color me undecided on if the Nexus One is the iPhone-killer, but it sure heats up the competition. Let’s wait and see what Apple have up their sleeve come June…

UPDATE:

I have just read Pogue’s review of the Nexus One.

And I have changed my color: the Nexus One is definitely not the iPhone-killer. Here’s why:

• It can supposedly handle only 190MB of apps, regardless of how much storage you have on board
• There is no multi-touch. Sorry, but no multi-touch, no cake.
• To quote Pogue:

the Nexus just doesn’t attain the iPhone’s fit and finish. The buttons under the screen (Back, Menu, Home, Search) are balky, often ignoring your finger-presses completely. One of the animated wallpapers freezes the phone with a message that says: “Sorry! The application Android Live Wallpapers has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.”