LWN: Comments on "The end of the road for the Nexus One"

The end of the road for the Nexus One

nye — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:52:22 +0000

Did everyone miss the fact that this is simply about Google no longer selling them directly to end users online? Why is this even an issue? It's not like Google are exactly known for being one of the world's foremost phone sellers.

Ubuntu

donbarry — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:12:38 +0000

You are saying then that Canonical is a *software* company?

I'd say that first and foremost, just as Google is not a search company
but rather an advertising company, Canonical is not a software company,
but rather a marketing company.

And therefore their promises of great new software, absent community and
upstream, should be taken with the bushels of the grains which they deserve.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

pphaneuf — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:18:48 +0000

I dropped 20 in a Vodaphone store in Portugal for a pay-as-you-go card, and got my previous Android phone working just fine. Here in Canada (and in the US too, although for slightly cheaper), you absolutely have to have a plan, with some expensive extras for data, and if I wanted the cheaper plans, the subsidy wasn't as good (I paid $250 for my iPhone 3G instead of the advertised $200).

There's a bit more to analyze, yes, and I understand it might be an acceptable compromise. For me, since I enjoy travelling, having an unlocked phone has a significant extra value, and as a hacker, having a phone I can play with is also an extra value. Both of these might not apply, or only partially, if you do not travel as much, or are not a hacker.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

johill — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:39:51 +0000

Ah, but you're over-simplifying. If you just buy the phone, you can't actually use it to make calls yet. So in reality, while the arithmetic is simple, you still have to compare plans w/ and w/o phones, and not all plans are offered the same, etc.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

wookey — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:32:36 +0000

I have never understood this. It's quite true, but I just don't understand why people don't include recurring/ongoing costs when they work out how much something costs overall. i.e. do $30 * 12(or24) months + $200 vs $600 and note that after say 18 months they'll be saving money. This applies to many areas of life (cars, phones, utility bills/energy efficiency etc). I don't mind if people still take the 'higher installments' route, perhaps because they don't have the cash upfront; it's the way that few people even bother to make the comparison that I find hard to understand.

Perhaps it's no wonder the western world collapsed under epic debt levels, given how even simple arithmetic seems to be beyond much of the populace.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

rilder — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:29:26 +0000

Nice(though depressing) article. The carriers and the vendors need to get over the locking part -- it is going to fail like DRM. It is sad to see Nexus One go -- may be they should have advertised as the editor puts it as 'heavily advertised, shiny devices', may be with celebs and all. It is good to see that other closed vendors are doing their part driving away customers with issues like antenna etc.

Regarding Nokia, its handsets are vastly popular everywhere but US for obvious reasons, and it is quite successful. So N900 and future open alternatives from Nokia should do well. They have also recently opened up their Qt development.

Lastly, talking about iPhone -- isnt that a successful BSD port to a mobile device -- even though this is Linux weekly, BSD should also be considered with equal glee :>.

Muscular writing

filipjoelsson — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:14:39 +0000

I laughed out loud when I originally read the same bit and when my wife looked questioningly at me, I read it to her too. Apart from having to explain flashing and bricking to her (we're not native english speakers) - she thought it very funny. Not least of all because I currently program PHP for a living.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

pphaneuf — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:15:38 +0000

Wasn't there "with contract" deals with T-Mobile for less than $200? I agree that the choice of carrier was minimal, though. In many European mobile shops, I remember seeing both the no-contract price, and the contract prices (for various number of years) on the labels, that would probably be best.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

sorpigal — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:39:05 +0000

If you're measuring popularity then perceived expense is more important than actual cost. Your average person is okay with a service contract and doesn't really consider it to be part of the cost of the phone. All they will see is $200 vs. $600.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

njd27 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:29:36 +0000

It's a pity they didn't standardize an Android accessory interface with the first phones that were launched.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

pphaneuf — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:21:35 +0000

I think it's a bit unfair to compare the Nexus One's price tag with that of an iPhone (whichever version) from a carrier. Find out the price of an iPhone 3G that is SIM-unlocked, just for fun. Around here, it was almost 40% more expensive! And for that much more, it wasn't re-flashable, just SIM-unlocked (which is greatly useful when traveling).

Muscular writing

moreati — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:07:03 +0000

Just a me-too. That was an informative and amusing article. Bravo.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

imcdnzl — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:43:58 +0000

"Nokia and Intel are both watching the smartphone market happen without them"

Interesting comment... Nokia still have 40% share worldwide of smartphone market - figures released today. Not quite happening without them and this is on a (now) open source system - Symbian.

Muscular writing

cry_regarder — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:02:13 +0000

Sounds like life with my freerunner

Ubuntu

jspaleta — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:12:42 +0000

End of the day... Canonical is not a hardware company...and that is significant. Canonical can try very hard and still not execute well enough to be picked up by device manufacturers. Canonical could have objectively the best set of technology for ARM hands down and still not win contracts when competing with Android or whatever ChromeOS evolves into as a product offering.

End of the day... its the hardware companies that make design decisions about the usability of their product. Why do you think HP snapped up WebOS? It makes a lot of since to control as much of the UI of your device as you can if you want to produce an integrate..distinctive experience. That's the lesson of Apple as a hardware company teaches us. This market reality puts Canonical in a weak position exactly because they aren't their own hardware company. They have to continue to prove to hardware vendors that they are the better value choice at the price points the hardware vendors require. Tough tough business..especially with Android out there as a competing value proposition.

For all the benefits of Ubuntu that certain linux enthusiasts see...end of the day.... Canonical has to show to hardware manufacturers that they bring better value to the table or device manufacturers aren't going to choose Ubuntu. Canonical's ARM initiative has been slow in comparison to the speed at which Google has been able to get Android workable across the ARM space. Speed of execution sort of matters a lot in this space and this is playing itself out in this year's device chatter.

All the chatter right now is about Android based ARM devices. Lenovo, Dell ...even freakin' Cisco are going ARM and going tablet and going Android.

Linaro might be a great incubation project to start getting linux on ARM into a cohesive shape to help streamline how OEMs can leverage linux in the future..but its far from clear that Canonical is going to be the software vendor that services the devices. Far from clear.

-jef

The end of the road for the Nexus One

sailorxyz — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:48:16 +0000

Actually, the Nexus One has just become available from Vodafone here in New Zealand :-) It is a great phone, I've had mine for 4 months now (bought in the USA via a third party as was not available in NZ at that time). After a string of Symbion and Windows phones I can confidently state that it is the best phone that I have had to date. It is good enough that since I got mine, no less than 4 other people at the company that I work for have also bought Nexus One phones. And that is despite the fact that as it was not officially available in NZ at the time, considerable inconvenience had to be tolerated to get the phones at all. Google did not help in anyway.

Anyway, from my perspective, it is a great phone and am well pleased with it. It should be good for three or four years by then hopefully Google will have brought out another reference phone.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

leoc — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:36:55 +0000

I *love* my N1 and I'll be babying it as much as possible so that it lasts a few years. Seems to me that Google never really marketed the phone, and the media's infatuation with everything Apple meant that it never really got a lot of mainstream press coverage. I don't really blame them for ending it as a commercial product, I think it served its stated purpose, I just hope they continue to make similarly hackable phones available to Android developers in the future.

One thing that really pisses me off about the store closing is that Google ended sales of the accessories, not just the phone. I was saving up for a car dock and now I am forced to go to ebay where I will be lucky if I don't pay a lot more for a used version.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

fandom — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:00:14 +0000

When they released the Nexus one they said they'd happy if they sold 150,000 units but they have sold updwards of half a million.

Not to bad for a failure, specially considering that Google didn't really care about selling it what they wanted was a good phone with vanilla andriod they could show off.

And there I think they had a great success, when the Nexus one was released media pundits were beginning to write about Android as an 'also-ran' but with the Nexus, the HTC Desire, which is pretty much the same phone, and the droids, now it is Apple and Android crushing the RIM, Nokia and, specially, Microsoft.

On the other hand, the idea of selling phones in their own site was a complete failure, that's where the 'carriers rule' comes from. Pity, a place were carriers would have to compete for our buisness on clear terms would have been great for us.

But anyway, my nexus one should be good for at least three years, let's hope there is something as open by then. I bought it unlocked from ebay.es for a lot less than 500 euros in case someone is interested.

Muscular writing

kamil — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:14:56 +0000

and it doesn't even come with a free case

That gave me a chuckle. Classic Jon Corbet.

"mass market open phones"

kirkengaard — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:56:11 +0000

There's a sad little part of me that wonders if this isn't like having a computer in your toaster. People may want a smarter toaster, but they don't want a computer that toasts bread. They want a toaster that works better. The old DWIM paradigm. Appliances have functions, and either work or don't.

Complicating the fact that it's hard to convince the general public that Free/open is something they want from the start may be the fact that a phone, even a smartphone, is merely an appliance. Even with a "long tail" of bells and whistles, its success as a piece of ubiquitous computing boils down to the fact that you can forget it's a computer. It has functions, not software.

That's obviously not to say that Free/open ceases to be a desirable feature, just that the user utility of Free/open has more to do with enabling. The closed ecosystems are good enough at selling their own enabling value without Free/open to make that extra "feature" a harder sell. Free/open becomes a thing for people who remember that it's a computer with software -- until and for as long as it fixes a problem with the appliance.

Muscular writing

kirkengaard — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:38:12 +0000

It definitely qualifies -- if someone else had written that on linux-kernel, it would wind up here as a QotW.

N900 an MeeGo

jospoortvliet — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:26:12 +0000

Hmmm. Please do note that the N900 however is the official development platform for MeeGo on mobile devices. So it is very unlikely it won't run on it, despite not being 'official'...

Nexus One is too similar to HTC Desire

erwbgy — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:35:06 +0000

I believe that one of the reasons why the Nexus One was a commercial failure was that Google contracted HTC to make it for them and then let HTC release an almost identical phone (the HTC Desire) which competed with it in the marketplace.

Differences: the Nexus One has a second mic to help filtering out ambient noise and has a trackball instead of an optical trackpad. The other main difference is that HTC run their own proprietary Sense UI on top of Android 2.1, which many people find much nicer to use.

I don't think the openness of the Nexus One had anything to do with its lack of success. The HTC Desire is just a better phone.

Muscular writing

nix — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:44:24 +0000

This piece expertly alternates horribly depressing content with witty and dry presentation. I'd say 'more, more' but more content like this requires more things to go wrong in the Linux world, so perhaps not.

Still, I found myself driven to read the bit Joe Buck pointed out to others in the room, a definite sign of very good writing (or, others might argue, of bad taste on my part).

Missed the boat

alex — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:52:41 +0000

The only reason I didn't jump on the Nexus One was because having brought the HTC Hero I promised myself I'd make the phone last. I was getting a little tired of the upgrade treadmill (not to mention how bad it is for the environment).

However my experiences waiting for HTC's eventual massively delayed release of Android 2.1 along with the pain of finding a Windows machine to force the upgrade (the horror, the horror) have convinced me that for my next phone openness will be much higher up the feature list.

While I still don't demand the same degree of openness on my phone as I do on my PCs I'm relearning the lessons of what it means when you give up the ability to update your core platform.

N900 an MeeGo

Felix.Braun — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:46:59 +0000

The sad truth is, that there will be no official support for MeeGo on the N900. So in addition to the uncertain (albeit promising) quality of the MeeGo firmware for phones, we don't yet know the hardware this operating system will run on.

Of course due to the mostly-open nature of the N900 it is assured that there will be a community-supported distribution based on MeeGo for the N900. And it looks like Nokia might provide some infrastructure for that effort. But the tight coupling of the N900 hardware and MeeGo OS that our esteemed editor seems to make, remains yet to be seen.

The end of the road for the Nexus One

smithj — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:45:21 +0000

Perhaps relatedly, Google gave away a Nexis One to everyone who attended the android hands-on event at OSCON (choice of ATT or tmobile). Even if they were just dumping stock they no longer plan to sell, I plan on having fun with it. :-)

The end of the road for the Nexus One

tajyrink — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:33:48 +0000

More greatness to newly found overclocking capabilities in Neo FreeRunner :) If someone still thinks 2(-3) year old hardware is not too old, handheld-linux.com is selling the über version "A7++" of it with _two_ company provided extra hardware fixes.

That said, mass market open phones would be welcome. N900 has potential at least for higher volume continuation device to FreeRunner (though of course not as open on the hardware side), since the only missing part starts to be modem driver which needs porting from ofono to FSO stack and stabilizing: https://elektranox.org/website/debian_on_n900.html

Ubuntu

rvfh — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:23:17 +0000

I think we are underestimating the willingness for Ubuntu to become a major player. They were in the Intel wagon until Intel went Fedora for Moblin 2, and are definitely trying very hard, now part of Linaro.

I know Ubuntu is not Debian, but it's as close as it gets compared to Android and iOS...

MeeGo

The_Barbarian — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 05:49:52 +0000

I really hope MeeGo takes off - at least enough for me to a handset at some point and for some Debian guys to create the Debian version. I don't really want any other type of smartphone at this point.

Muscular writing

JoeBuck — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:22:07 +0000

Quote of the week

Your editor will confess that he still feels a certain childlike joy at the prospect of reflashing an expensive device that he depends on, possibly bricking it, then painfully restoring all of the settings and discovering all of the new bugs which have been added. It's the sort of adrenaline experience that others, perhaps, seek through horror movies, bungee jumping, investing in equities, or PHP programming. -- Jon Corbet

The end of the road for the Nexus One

karim — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 01:34:16 +0000

I think this is close to the mark. FWIW, here are some tweets I posted last month around this topic:
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour/status/16948577211
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour/status/16476123955
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour/status/16475358717

That last is the most important one I think. Basically, the issue is that what consumers expect of their "touch" phones has very little in common with most OSS apps ever written. Jobs makes the point that all desktop apps need rewriting for touch and I think he's on the mark there. Given the the vast majority of touch apps are not OSS and that most OSS apps evolved by and for a specific community, the question then becomes of whether the developers of the former (should) have an inclination to OSS and whether the developers of the latter have a strong enough inclination to make apps they themselves may feel are too basic for their own needs. My bet is the former care for selling apps regardless of the license and the latter can't feel compelled to create apps of little use to themselves.

That said, I do hope Android and Meego the best.

My 0.02$

Muscular writing

ncm — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 01:24:29 +0000

This story may mark a new high in our esteemed editor's compositional career. Such vigorous adjectives! Such heady analogies! I look forward eagerly to further examples.