Nexus done
Mobile app analytics outfit Flurry has published an estimate of the total sales for the first 74 days after launch of the Google Nexus One and compared it with the iPhone and the Motorola Droid over the same period. Why 74 days? Because that's how long Apple says it took to sell the first million iPhones.
The Droid actually managed to narrowly top the iPhone's sales over this period, according to Flurry, but the Nexus One is lagging way behind with a mere 135,000. Furthermore, to put the Droid's performance into perspective, Flurry points out that it launched two and a half years after the first iPhone and the market is far more familiar with the concept of a smartphone now.
So, looking at these figures, it's hard to argue that the launch of the Nexus One has been anything other than a failure for Google. "As Google and Apple continue to battle for the mobile marketplace, Google Nexus One may go down as a grand, failed experiment or one that ultimately helped Google learn something that will prove important in years to come," says the Flurry blog post.
We think that final point was the real motivation behind the launch of the Nexus One - it was never meant to be a standalone commercial success for Google, rather it's a way of Google demonstrating the full capabilities of Android via a platform it can control. Yes, there's also the experiment in taking mobile operators out of the equation, but you have to question how seriously Google took even that.
