The most important question for German smartphone users at today’s official presentation of the Google phone Nexus One has been answered: The Google phone Nexus One will not be available in Germany or any other European country at least for another few months. Even though Google partners with T-Mobile USA in selling the new Android smartphone, it is only available at the new Google web store at http://www.google.com/phone for USD 529.00 for an unlocked phone or USD 179.00 for a phone with a two-year contract of T-Mobile. According to today’s announcement by Google, Vodafone will offer the Nexus One phone in Europe in spring.

The biggest news of today’s press conference in Mountainview is that Google is selling smartphones itself. The Google web store has opened today in the United States and will be shipping to test markets like the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. People purchasing the Nexus One at the Google web store have to have a Google account and pay by using Google checkout. When visiting the Google web store right now, German users will get the notice that the phone is not available in their country.

Nexus One, Picture: Phone Guide Germany

Features

Everything else about the Nexus One was already known beforehand. It is built by HTC and sports a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels which does not support multi-touch (yet), a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash and MPEG-4 video capture capabilities with 720 x 480 pixels at at least 20 frames per second and one-click YouTube upload, and a music player with A2DP stereo Bluetooth and 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. For mobile data transmissions the quadband-GSM smartphone supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSPA with up to 7.2 mbps download speed and up to 2.0 mbps upload speed. Users of the Nexus One can also access the internet via WiFi (802.11b/g/n) or use location based services via integrated A-GPS.

There is no physical keyboard on the 11.5-millimeter phone, but a trackball a multicolor LED for different notifications. Because of a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor of Qualcomm with 512 MB RAM it is probably one of the fastest smartphone in the market at the moment and the Nexus One runs the new Android version 2.1 (Eclair)

The smartphone also features light and proximity sensors as well as an accelerometer, a compass and two microphones for “active noise suppression” when talking on the phone. According to Google, talk time is up to ten hours on 2G or up to seven hours on 3G due to a 1,400 mAh removable battery. There is only 512 MB internal storage capacity, but the phone supports microSD memory cards with up to 32 GB.

Nexus One, Picture: Phone Guide Germany

Business Model

Google might alienate its present partners, but the company has also to gain a lot. When purchasing the Nexus One, customers first decide on the phone and then on a mobile operator – not the other way around as they have been used to. In this business model, it is not the carrier offering several cell phones to its price plans anymore, but carriers competing about the buyer of one specific phone. Before we have seen Apple selling its ipHone at retail stores. What this could lead to? Maybe to an end of the existing carrier-dominated distribution model and hopefully even to price cuts in price plans for mobile phone calls, messaging and mobile internet services. Google, running an advertisement network, will benefit from more mobile phone users using internet services. Sooner or later we will probably also hear more of services such as Google Voice or of inexpensive mobile phone calls and mobile internet access in exchange for accepting advertisement on the mobile phone’s screen.

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