Google’s superphone has not been so super in the first couple of weeks of sales. Only 20,000 in the first week barely grazed the first week’s sales of the Droid and wasn’t even a blip on the radar if you are the iPhone. So what does this mean for the future of the superphone and the superphones to follow?
There is obviously a reason for the low selling numbers and that is in the marketing by Google. You don’t see any fancy T.V. commercials where the Nexus One flies to space or something like that. But you do see it plastered over technology blogs that run adsense (which is a hefty majority). In a way that is genius because they are targeting the only people that really care about yet another smartphone. But, they have limited themselves to a small audience rather than trying to hit the mainstream.
The second reason behind the low sales is the marketplace. While this is a good stab at replacing retail stores, no one outside of the tech community really knows about it. There are no posters about the Nexus in T-Mobile stores, or sales people pitching the device to every person who walks in the store. The majority of average cell-phone users walk in their closest retail store, and walk out with the shiniest object on the shelf. With the Nexus One only available online, how are any of these users really going to know about it?
Of course, the Nexus One is not for everyone, and is really attractive to those tech-heads that like the “latest and greatest” and generally the users that support Android. And to be honest, the power of an Android device with a 1 ghz processor will not be optimized by a person who has been using a flip phone for the past 5 years.
With rumors of the next Google phone already flying around, the future of the superphones is still blurry. But Google has the money to try and fail until it wipes out every other phone manufacturer if it has to.
And this concept art shows that they are well on their way to doing so. At least if this is anything like the actual device.
My recommendation to Google? Well they should invest in a proper T.V. marketing campaign. At least containing the link to the online store. That would do wonders for exposure and let people actually know there is a competitor to the look and feel of the iPhone. But for now, I would expect Google to be their same stubborn selves and go about getting sales the hard way.
Agree or disagree? Drop a comment below.
Contact: hunterclarke [at] layeredbyte [dot] com