No New Nexus In Sight, Says Schmidt: Nexus One Did Its Job
Many people were confused with the Nexus One’s ultimate purpose. Google wasn’t trying to sell a bajillion million phones to be named the king of smartphone distribution. Instead, they were trying to set a bar that all manufacturers should aim to reach to provide their customers with a very pleasant Android experience.
Up until the Nexus One’s launch, we’d been getting Android devices that – at the time – seemed to be powerful enough for everyone’s taste. All of that changed when Google smacked us in the face with the new device they’d been confirmed to be testing in early December. After then, we quickly saw a new era of Android devices ushered in. Eric Schmidt echoed their vision and its outcome in an interview with Telegraph:
the idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn’t have to do a second one. We would view that as positive but people criticized us heavily for that. I called up the board and said: ‘Ok, it worked. Congratulations – we’re stopping’. We like that flexibility, we think that flexibility is characteristic of nimbleness at our scale
While the Motorola Droid was the first big step in Android’s progression, the Nexus One encouraged manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung, and HTC to step their game up even more and to start offering devices that could keep up with the fast-growing platform. Now – just half a year later – we have more high-end devices to choose from than some would probably like, and it’s only going to get more aggressive from here on out.
Phones with 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, dual-core processors, HD video features, and any more bells and whistles you can think of are all on the horizon, and Google couldn’t be happier that they’ll be capable enough to run whatever their imagination can dream up.