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Does Nexus One’s Poor Numbers Mean a Strategy Change?

Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Features

Gizmodo is reporting today that the Nexus One, released in early January as Google’s flagship Android smartphone product has had very poor sales numbers when compared to its competitors. Counting the seventy-four days since the Nexus One has been released, and then comparing the Droid and iPhone the numbers are paltry for Google. While the iPhone and Motorola Droid tallied a million and 1.05 million respectively, the Nexus One has only shipped 135,000 phones.At that number,  the highly touted iPad tablet already has more pre-orders than Google’s official phone has sold.

But let’s go back to highly touted. Although the tablet from Apple was never really a for sure thing, there were plenty of news stories about it long before it was unveiled, one of the biggest was the fact that Apple already owned the domain name for iSlate – the supposed name for the device at the time. So what about the publicity for the Nexus One? Pretty slim, and it almost seemed like and afterthought once Motorola hit it big with the Droid that Google felt they almost had to release their own phone.

On the subject of Motorola, keep in mind that the marketing campaign for the Droid was in excess of $100 million dollars. There wasn’t a time you could turn on the TV and hear a robot saying “Droid” in the commercial blitz that commenced at the phone’s launch. By contrast, I’ve never seen a Nexus One commercial – the only ads that I have seen are on Google pages and some ads sprinkled here and there on the internet.

Just because the numbers are not that good for Google doesn’t mean that they haven’t learned a lot from this exercise. Remember, this was the first actual product that Google has released. And they decided to do it differently than any other mobile phone manufacturer on the market by selling it themselves. Even though in reality it was made by HTC, it has the Google brand on it.

Now they will sell the Nexus One for AT&T, competing directly with Apple – but you have to pay the full $529 for the privilege.

When it comes time for Google to sell their own computing device, what path will they take? I have a feeling that they will sell one themselves, but they may opt to also get the backing of a large manufacturer as well for mass marketing purposes. Remember, Acer as of late has been doing a lot of posturing about being the first to market with a Chrome OS netbook, that they will sell millions of them this year and so on.

Whatever the choice may be, it’s clear that the Nexus One was a trial run that required very little marketing expense for the company, which is where things could have got expensive. After all, it seems as if HTC is rolling out new phones all the time anyway, why not help Google out since incidentally, the search engine giant lent a hand with the G1 smartphone?

And don’t forget, the Nexus One has received favorable reviews, some calling it the best Android phone yet – even Gizmodo. Google doesn’t care about popularity for its branded devices yet; it’s more concerned with providing the best user experience possible.

Tags: android, apple, Droid, HTC, iPad, Motorola, netbook, Nexus One, smartphone, tablet