With only a few days more to go until the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the question is: Will the Nexus One be the Google Phone or a Google phone? Will the Nexus One offer new features that other Android smartphones such as the Motorola Milestone with Android 2.0 (read the review) do not support or will it just be an example of what all future Android smartphones will be capable of? There is evidence for both sides of the argument: Google genuinely getting into the hardware business or just giving Android another push as the competitive platform to the iPhone OS.

Google Would Be Competing with Partnering Manufacturers

On the one hand, Google has invited American journalists to a press conference on January 5th in Mountain View for an official demonstration of the phone, it has handed out preview versions of the Nexus One to its employees, and Google will sell the Nexus One online itself. On the other hand, this is not the first time that Google employees have a shot at a phone before regular users, Google must be interested in platform independence in order to gain revenue from online advertisements, and Google would compete with smartphone manufacturers that have been partners of Google and promoting the Android OS successfully so far. My guess is that later on the Nexus One will be just one Android phone of many, but a great one which will be available without SIM-lock and long-term contracts if desired.

Howsoever, the mobile phone users will probably benefit from a close integration of hardware and operating system. Google is known for some great mobile services such as Google Search, Google Mail with push-delivery, Google Talk, Google Maps or Youtube. Google Maps Navigation and Google Voice will sooner or later be available in Germany, too, also a German language version of Goggles. All these services are free of charge for the user and will probably be pre-installed on the new Google phone. According to rumours, the Nexus One will run on Android 2.1 and be powered by a Snapdragon processor of Qualcomm with 1 GHz. The phone will also boast of rich – but not of spectacular – features such as an 3.7-inch capacitive AMOLED touchscreen with multi-touch support and gesture functions, a physical QWERTY keyboard, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, WiFI, A-GPS, a 5-megapixel camera and a music player with a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.

Do We Want so Much Google in Our Lives?

Android has been initiated by Google. The idea behind it: Google offers the operating system to several device manufacturers for free in order to inspire a broad range of mobile phones that are constantly connected to the web and that are friendly to Google online services. And the open source OS will bring about a wide variety of (innovative) applications.

The Apple iPhone and the AppStore have been the starting point of a touchscreen smartphone boom. With Android OS, the Android Market and new Google phones Google aims to gain influence – if not more control – in the smartphone and mobile services market. Either way, the user might benefit from inexpensive mobile phone calls and mobile internet access – maybe in exchange for accepting advertisement on the mobile phone’s screen. But the following question will be: Do we want so much Google in our lives?

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