After much fanfare that sent tech blogs and the industry ablaze, Google is putting an end to its “superphone” aspirations. Yes, the Nexus One is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
The company, which received its last batch of phones less than one week ago, has sold out every single one of the inventory from their online store. Those hoping to score one can turn to European and Korean carriers who still have it on stock (both Vodafone and KT has them), along with some likely overpriced pieces on eBay.
Barely six months old, Google’s “experiment” as a hardware retailer and a mobile phone brand is a bust, something very few people expected at the start of the project. In fact, many pundits declared the Nexus One as potential serious competition for the iPhone’s market dominance – a claim that quickly died a few months in, when everyone realized that nobody was actually buying the HTC-built “superphone.”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says they’ve reached all their goals with the smartphone, which is, apparently, to challenge manufacturers to come up with extraordinary hardware to run Android on. Of course, it’s an obvious load of nonsense. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that the company was talking about producing a family of devices around Android.
