Hasta La Gadget!

Updated 01/13  to include Google’s comments.

Google’s Nexus One phone may have been one of the most anticipated devices of the last few weeks. But since the smartphone’s launch last Tuesday, it has left a string of unhappy customers in its wake.

Nexus One has been plagued by consumer complaints including spotty 3G connectivity, a high early termination fee, poor customer support from Google and problems with the touchscreen.

“There are some aspects of the experience that Google didn’t think through as carefully as they should have,” says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “This has implications for the store they have launched and their future ambitions for it. Google, clearly, has a lot of work ahead of it.”

Google introduced the Nexus One as the first device to be sold by the search company itself, rather than a manufacturing or carrier partner. The Nexus One, which runs Android 2.1, has been designed by HTC and works with T-Mobile’s network in the United States. But contrary to initial speculation, the device isn’t free. It will retail for $180 with a 2-year contract with T-Mobile. An unlocked version is also available for $530 — a price similar to most other smartphones — and that version will work on other GSM phone networks worldwide as well as AT&T in the United States, although with some limitations.

The difference, though, is the Nexus One is available only through Google’s online store. Unlike with a Motorola Cliq or a HTC G1, users can’t walk into a T-Mobile store and buy the Nexus One. They can’t even count on T-Mobile’s customer service representatives in store or the company’s phone support to solve their problems. Instead, Nexus One customers can only get e-mail support from Google.

It’s a strategy that has backfired on Google. The company’s support forums are full of customer complaints around the Nexus and the company’s poor service.

“A lot of complaints and frustration that people are expressing would normally be handled by going back into the store or by calling the support help line,” says Golvin. “Having a physical location where you can take your phone back helps customers and Google seems to have underestimated that.”

“Solving customer support issues is extremely important to us, because we want people to have a positive Nexus One experience,” says a Google spokesperson. “We are trying to be as open and transparent as possible through our online customer help forums.”

Many of the customer complaints are centered about the device’s inability to connect to T-Mobile’s 3G network. The Nexus One does not pick up the 3G network or keeps switching to the slower EDGE network, say some users.

A Google spokesperson says the company is aware of the problem. “We are aware of the issues that have affected a small number of users and are working quickly to fix any problems,” the spokesperson told Wired.com in an email. “We hope to have more information soon. When we do, we will post it to the user forum.”

Add to all this Google’s decision to charge a separate early termination fee in addition to the one charged by T-Mobile. Nexus One customers who bought the subsidized, $180 version and then decide to cancel their contracts will have to pay $200 to T-Mobile. But Google also charges users a $350 “equipment recovery fee” if you give up on the contract within 120 days.

Including all charges, Nexus One customers who want to bail early will end up paying  $550. That’s significantly higher than the controversial $350 early termination fee imposed by Verizon last year.

“Google provides a subsidy for devices purchased with T-Mobile USA service. If a consumer cancels service after 14 days, Google recoups this subsidy in the form of an equipment recovery fee,” says the Google spokesperson. “After 120 days, the equipment recovery fee will no longer apply. This is standard practice for third party resellers of T-Mobile and other operators, and you will find similar policies for other mobile service resellers. The T-Mobile early termination fee is separate and handled by T-Mobile.”

Despite the problems, Google can bounce back, says Golvin. Customer dissatisfaction is likely to be just a small speed bump in the road for Google’s mobile ambitions, he says.

“Google tends to have a bit of a Teflon coating,” says Golvin. “People tend to cut them a lot more slack — as they do with Apple — than they do with their mobile operator.”

Do you like your Nexus One? Have you faced any of these problems? Let us know your Nexus One experience in the comments.

See Also:

• Google Nexus One Phone Likely to Launch Jan. 5
• Nexus One Hardware Details Revealed
• Rumor: Google Nexus One $530 Unlocked, $180 With Plan
• Everything You Wanted to Know About the Google Nexus One

We wanted to hate Pocket Heat, because it seems like such a terrible, foolish idea for an iPhone application. But we couldn’t, because a) the design and execution, right down to the lovely application icon, is absolutely dead-on and b) it doesn’t actually work any more

Pocket Heat turned the iPhone into a heater. You slid your finger and dial in the amount of heat you needed, and the app would industriously push the CPU and other processes in order to warm things up. If it worked on a regular computer, its fans would spin up and pump out hot air like a hair dryer.

The past-tense review is because the latest version of Pocket Heat doesn’t actually heat anything: it merely lights up the screen with a mellow, warm glow. According to the iTunes Store page, it “has no heating capabilities/battery drain” and instead features “warming graphics and sound effects”.

We imagine that consumer hatred caused this reversal, as draining the battery and overheating a computer is a rather stupid thing to do. But shouldn’t we be able to choose to be stupid? I guess that now the most stupid thing to do is to buy a $2 app that just shows pictures of a heater on screen. Hot? Sadly, not.

Pocket Heat [iTunes via Mashable]

LAS VEGAS –Motorola launched its third Android smartphone, an attractive, compact device with some surprising hardware innovations and a user interface that aggregates social networking feeds, email and contacts.

The phone called Backflip has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, a QWERTY physical keyboard that opens up in an unexpected way, a touch sensitive navigation panel on the back and a nifty mode that allows it to be postioned on the table top to act like an alarm clock.

The device is expected to hit the market in the first quarter of the year  but the company did not disclose pricing or a telecom partner for the device.

“This is a phone with a great keyboard, a big screen and integration with social networking,” says Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha.

Since Google debuted the open source Android operating system in October 2008, Android devices have flooded the market. More than ten Android handsets are currently available with more waiting to burst into the spotlight. AT&T announced Wednesday that it will offer  five new Android smartphones this year. On Tuesday, Google introduced its own Android handset, the HTC designed Nexus One running the latest version of the Android OS, Android 2.0

Motorola is trying to stay a step ahead, says Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group.  ”We have seen a lot of Android models appear quickly on the market,” he says. “So it’s starting to become more important for manufacturers to differentiate themselves.”

An eye-catching phone

Like the Motorola Droid, the Backflip has a physical keyboard and a touchscreen. But Motorola seems to have listened to complaints about the Droid’s difficult to use keypad.

The Backflip’s keypad feels solid and has generously spaced buttons that ensure you don’t end up hitting the wrong keys. The keyboard also opens up differently.

“Most people are used to a forward flipping keyboard or an upward slider,” says Paul Nicholson, global marketing director for Motorola. “The Backflip’s keyboard opens up in the reverse direction.”

That allows the phone to fold up and sit on a table top like a horizontally placed picture frame. In that mode, the Backflip displays a clock, turning it into a bedside timepiece.

Another interesting innovation is a one-inch touch sensitive swatch on the back of the phone. That trackpad supports gestures such as swipe and double-tap. So users can browse the internet or flip through the device’s seven home screens by touching the back of the phone.

The idea works well enough and it won’t be long before other handset manufacturers offer the feature.

Beyond that, the Backflip has all the usual features–Wi-Fi connectivity, 3G, a 5-megapixel camera and a video recorder.

Motorola did not disclose what kind of processor is powering the phone. With the 1 GHz Snapdragon processor–included in the Google Nexus One–setting the standard for speed, much will depend on how powerful the innards of the Backflip turn out to be.

Chaneling the Cliq

When it comes to the user interface, the Backflip is identical to Motorola’s first Android phone, the Cliq. The Backflip has Motorola’s custom skin called MotoBlur that combines information from social networking feeds such as Twitter, and Facebook with email contacts and the phone address book. It also offers free online backup of the data on the device and a find-my-phone service for lost devices.

Models of the Backflip at the Motorola  event were running Android 1.6 but the company says it hasn’t decided which version it will ultimately ship with.

Overall, the Backflip is a gorgeous piece of hardware and cements Motorola’s position as a handset manufacturer that can create phones strong enough to stand out from the clutter.

Though Motorola hasn’t announced the pricing for the Backflip, NPD’s Rubin says it could cost about the same as a Cliq–$100 with a two-year contract. And being a GSM phone, it is likely this device could end up on AT&T.

See Also:

• Review: Motorola Cliq
• Motorola’s First Android Phone Takes Aim at Social Networks
• Review: Motorola Droid
• Hands On: Motorola’s New Android Phone Nails Design

LAS VEGAS — It’s not easy to find an Android phone that hasn’t been churned out by the HTC factory. The Saygus Vphone is a smartphone from a Utah-based company that promises a nifty handset with one unique feature: the ability to make two-way video calls even on an EDGE network.

“We have designed our own proprietary video calling software that’s optimized so you can get three to four hours of video calling capability on extremely low bandwidths,” says Chad Sayers, founder and CEO of Saygus.

Video conferencing is still a novelty in smartphones. It can guzzle bandwidth and carriers have been hesitant to support the applications. Saygus says its video calling software can change that. It won’t bog down the network and can run 18-22 frames a second on Edge network and up to 30 frames a second on 3G. Saygus estimates that 5GB of bandwidth can support 10,000 minutes of video conferencing on the phone.

Saygus also hopes to partner with Skype to bring Skype video calling to the phone.

The Saygus Vphone has a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus and flash and also a forward facing camera. The phone runs a Marvel 624 MHz processor and has a 3.5-inch touchscreen (Complete specs.) Overall, the phone looks similar to Motorola’s Droid in its hardware design. But for the few minutes that we got our hands on it, the keyboard felt a lot more comfortable and easy to use than the Droid.

The CDMA Vphone is currently in carrier testing and there’s speculation it could make eventually be available on Verizon. As for pricing, all Sayers will say is that it will be “very competitive.”

See Also:

• Google Debuts Android-Powered Nexus One ‘Superphone’
• Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top
• Verizon Promises Two New Android Phones This Year
• 12 Phones Strong, Android Army Mobilizes for Explosive Growth

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Apple may have the Jesus phone, but today Google rolled out its own “superphone.”

Google unveiled its Nexus One touchscreen handset during a private press-only event at its headquarters here Tuesday. Developed in partnership with hardware manufacturer HTC, the Nexus One is Google’s first branded entry into the smartphone market.

The Nexus One runs the latest version of Google’s Android mobile operating system, allowing for several forward-thinking features. Nexus One users can rely on speech anywhere on the phone where text can be input — users can speak their e-mails, text messages, tweets and web searches. The phone also uses dual-microphone noise cancellation for improved voice quality and speech recognition, and has a vastly improved user interface which incorporates widgets that can pull in live data feeds from web services like Facebook.

“The Nexus One is where web meets phone,” says Google vice president of Android project management Mario Queiroz, pictured above. “It’s an exemplar of what’s possible on mobile phones. It belongs in an emerging category of devices which we call superphones.”

The phone will retail for $180 with a 2-year contract with T-Mobile, but will also be available for $530 unlocked (spot on with the latest speculation). It ships today and is available for purchase immediately at Google’s new online store. The Nexus One will be available on Verizon and Vodaphone networks this spring, Google says.

Google’s Nexus One will not only have to compete against other web-enabled handheld devices like the iPhone and Palm Pre, but also other Android phones such as the Motorola Droid. By releasing its own phone, Google puts itself in direct competition with other members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a consortium of mobile hardware and software developers and carriers, all of whom have been working on Google’s Linux-based Android operating system. It could represent a tricky balance for the company to maintain.

The handset itself is sleek and gorgeous. It’s housed in a thin exterior case less than half an inch (11.5 mm) thick, and it weighs only 4.5 ounces (130 grams). The Nexus One also boasts some impressive hardware. It features a zippy 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which Google says enables the phone to seamlessly run multiple applications at once. A trackball allows users to navigate the interface, and also uses different colored lights to send various alerts — such as a new call or e-mail message. It also sports a 3.7-inch touchscreen AMOLED display with a native resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, a 5-megapixel camera, 512 MB of RAM and ROM, and a microSD slot that’s expandable up to 32 GB of storage (it ships with a 4-GB card). It has a compass and an accelerometer, and light and proximity sensors allow the device to save power by dimming or shutting off the screen. A metal plate on back is designed for personal engraving. There is no hardware keyboard.

Although the Nexus One was only officially unveiled Tuesday, the debut has been highly anticipated for weeks, as Google had all but announced it was on the way. The company gave a pre-release version of the phone to all of its employees just before the holidays, and posted a message to its mobile blog about the “dogfooding” process of testing a new mobile device.

The Nexus One runs Android 2.1, the latest version of Google’s free mobile operating system, and the phone relies on the new software for several key enhancements. For example, every single text field on the device is voice-enabled.

“The evolution we’ve seen around voice recognition in the past year or two has just been phenomenal,” says Google senior product manager Erick Tseng, referring to the company’s Google Voice app and the voice commands on the Google Droid.

“We wanted to take it to the next level.”

Tseng demoed the voice applications, which were impressive. And while the speech-to-text translation was quite zippy, Tseng noted it will continue to learn more and continue to improve with every spoken command.

Other new Android apps demoed on the Nexus One including a weather app that lets you see weather predictions minute-by-minute throughout the day, and a new photo gallery application that re-sizes photos as you scroll through them, or skews the photos when phone is tilted to give the illusion of depth. Google’s Queiroz noted that all members of the OHA will have access to the 2.1 software once it is released in a matter of days.

Google’s new online store is, in some ways, bigger news than the phone itself. It allows the company to interact directly with consumers, just as Apple does. It lets users buy phones with or without service, which also lets Google do an end-run around carriers.

In an ironic twist, Motorola had been invited to the event, but CEO Sanjay Jha got stuck in traffic and arrived nearly an hour and a half late. Jha claimed Motorola was not concerned about Google putting its weight behind a competitor’s product.

“This expansion of the ecosystem is healthy for both of us,” Jha says.

The phone seems pointedly designed to move the United States towards a more European-style model, where consumers buy unlocked phones at a higher, unsubsidized price. The company made point to note this repeatedly during the Q&A session with journalists that followed the demos.

In a move perhaps designed to appease other members of the OHA, the company noted it will link to the Droid and other devices from its web store, and will add Google branding to “any great product.” However, it noted that it’s only going to look at products that succeed both in terms of simplicity and performance.

“It’s not our intention to flood the web store,” said Queiroz.

Google vice president of engineering for mobile Andy Rubin, who has headed up Google’s Android project since its inception, joined the team for the Q&A session.

Rubin left the door open to releasing a free, ad-supported version in the future.

“The first baby step here is: Let’s get an online story going,” he says, “and let’s figure out what they best way to enhance it in the future.”

In response to questions about his previous assertions that Google was not building its own phone, Rubin slyly asked the press to look closely at his previous comments.

“I said Google won’t build hardware,” he says.

Photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

See also
Gadget Lab’s Google Nexus One Preview
Rumor: Google Nexus One $530 Unlocked, $180 With Plan
Android Gets a Better Browser: Now With More HTML5
Meet Android, the Google Phone’s Robot Brain