Google launched their much anticipated Nexus One handset to a at their Mountain View headquarters today. The device, which the company has dubbed a ‘superphone’ is now available to buy for shipping to four countries - the US, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Google announced their intention to ship to more countries in the near future, although the only timeframe they were willing to give at the press event was ‘soon’.
The phone will cost $530 unlocked for use on GSM networks, or $180 on T-Mobile (US) with a 2-year contract. Shipping is free within the US and customers can choose to add custom engraving to the lower bezel during the online purchase process. To buy the phone online you’ll need a both a regular Google Account and a Google Checkout account.
They also announced that they will be expanding the online store to include more carriers and devices, including handsets such as the DROID from Motorola some time in the Spring. A subsidised version of the phone with a Vodafone plan will be coming to Europe around the same time.
The Nexus One has a really fast 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, with a 3.7-inch, 480x800 AMOLED screen. The camera is 5 megapixels with an LED flash—it also shoots MPEG-4 video with one-click YouTube upload, which should be quick over its wireless N Wi-Fi. The trackball has a multicolor LED for different notifications, and of course it’s got a compass, GPS, stereo Bluetooth, 3.5mm headphone jack, two mics for “active noise suppression,” light and proximity sensors, and an accelerometer onboard. It’s got a 1400mAH battery, from which Google promises 5 hours of 3G browsing and 7 hours of 3G talk time.
The device will be running an updated version of the Android mobile operating system - version 2.1. Google also stated that this latest version of the open source Android software will be released for use on other handsets in the next few days. We’ll be posting more details on what’s new in Android 2.1 in a subsequent post.
Notable features of the new Android software demoed at the press event included a new weather widget, new 3D framework, a photo visualisation system with Picasa web album syncing and voice recognition which works in all text fields across the device. There’s also a new Google Earth application for Android with voice integration. We’ve posted some videos from Google which demo some of these features.
We’ll have more posts coming soon as we flesh out our from Google’s announcement.
