So apparently the cats over at Gizmodo have gotten their hands on leaked pics of the Nexus One‘s landing and purchase page. First, the meat. According to the pages, the phone will be available in two ways: as a $529.99 unsubsidized and unlocked device, and as a $179.99 T-Mobile device locked to a two year contract. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s exactly the same story as every other phone available on the market right now. Additionally, the pics seem to suggest that there will only be one plan available should you get the device on contract — 500 minutes of talk time, unlimited text, data, and mobile to mobile for $79.99 — which happens to exactly equal what you’d pay for a T-Mobile Even More 500 plan with unlimited smartphone data and unlimited messaging, so that means there’s no bogus premium here. Furthermore, Giz claims that if you cancel your contract within 120 days you have to pay a $350 fee (a la Verizon) or return the phone to Google, and any existing customer that wishes to buy the phone has to switch to the Nexus One plan.

One thing that caught our eye is a mention of personalization — you’ll be able to get the phone engraved, something that we’ve been able to independently confirm through another tipster of ours. It looks like you can do two lines of text on a metallic bar on the back of the device… just don’t expect to return it if you do (seriously, it says right in the terms of service that you’re married to that thing if you get it etched).

To be perfectly honest, it’s hard to say if this is the real deal or not. We don’t get why Google would want to lock you into a single plan, nor do we fully understand why you would need to activate your phone via the website (as shown in the grab). Of course, the big G sometimes works in mysterious ways — perhaps they’re going for a little Apple magic here with restrictive plans and draconian ideas about how you can use the phone. It wouldn’t be surprising given the timing of the company’s little event next week. Don’t worry, all will be revealed soon enough.

Update: Well what do you know. We’ve just been hit with a few photos of our own, apparently straight from HTC training materials, according to a tipster. And what else? Oh yes — a PDF of the terms of sale, which you can download and view right here.

Allegedly leaked Nexus One purchase page answers, raises questions (update: we’ve got the terms of sale) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It manages to never actually call out the device by name, but T-Mobile’s thrown up some internal verbiage mentioning that “Google… is scheduled to launch a new Android device in early January.” That would line up with information we’d previously received reporting to some sort of January 5 launch, and we can only assume they’re talking about the Nexus One here — though the name could still change by the time this hits retail channels. Interestingly, T-Mobile calls out that Google and HTC will be directly responsible for support on the handset, bypassing T-Mobile for everything other than wireless service — the great “dumb pipe” dream, realized. Stay tuned, because it looks like this is all about to get real.

T-Mobile makes internal mention of Nexus One (sort of) for ‘early January’ release originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thanks to a clandestine meeting with a source, I got a chance to play with and try out the Nexus One. It’s basically, from my time with it, Google’s Droid killer. It’s thin, it’s fast, it’s better in every way.

My source was very firm about no photography, and I didn’t want to jeopardize anything on my source’s end, so there are no photos, hence these photos are ones we’ve already shown you. But, based on all the leaked shots this week, plus the very pretty and very clear one last week from Boy Genius, everyone knows what the phone looks like already. Hell, there’s even a complete UI walkthrough today that’s on YouTube. So I’m going to focus on the experience, and how it compares to the Droid and the iPhone 3GS.

How it feels

The Nexus One is slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS, and slightly lighter. No hard specs were thrown around, unfortunately, since Google didn’t even let people who they gave the phone to know that. The back is definitely not cheap and plasticky, like the iPhone’s backing, and feels like some sort of rubbery material. So, not smooth like the iPhone, but not as rubbery as the Droid. It’s halfway in-between.

You can call the design the antithesis of the Droid: smooth, curved, and light, instead of hard, square and pointy. It feels long and silky and natural in your hand—even more so than the iPhone 3GS. There are also three gold contacts on the bottom designed for future docking (possibly charging?) use, but there aren’t any accessories available for the phone now. It plugs in via microUSB at the moment.

That screen is damn good

Even though the screen is the same size and same resolution as the Droid, it’s noticeably better. The colors are much more vibrant and the blacks are blacker, as evidenced by putting both side by side and hitting up various websites and loading various games. The pinks on Perez Hilton and the blues on Gizmodo just popped a lot more on the N1, and made the Droid (which was actually considered to have a great screen) seem washed out. The same feeling carries over when you compare the Nexus with the iPhone 3GS. And it’s pretty damn bright, compared to the other two phones.

This is probably the best screen we’ve seen on a smartphone so far. Probably.

Why is it so fast?

Google just gave Motorola (and Verizon) a swift shot to the TSTS, because the Nexus One is astonishingly faster than the Droid. The speed dominance was most evident when we compared the loading of webpages, but even when you’re just scrolling around, launching apps and moving about the OS, you could tell that there’s a beefier brain inside the N1. I don’t know the specs for sure, but there’s talk of a 1GHz processor being inside, which would push it quite a ways above the 550MHz Arm A8 in Motorola’s newest toy.

When comparing the three phones in loading a webpage over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many webpage loads, so it’s indicative of something going on inside with the hardware.

I ran all three through a Javascript benchmark engine for some quantifiable numbers, and while the results were similar between the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS, the Droid still came up at about 60% of the other two. Surprisingly enough, Mobile Safari on the iPhone scored better on the Javscript benches than the Nexus did, even though the Nexus was able to pull down and render actual web pages faster. Note that I didn’t list actual numbers here, for privacy reasons.

That crazy video background

You’ve no doubt heard about the animated video backgrounds, but they’re actually more than just animations: you can interact with them.

The default background is the square/8-bit like one shown above, where lines of colored squares come in from different sides of the screen. What’s neat (even if it is superfluous and battery draining) is that you can tap anywhere on the desktop in a blank space and trigger dots to spread out from your tap. Basically, press anywhere to cause blocks to fly outwards. The same thing happens in the “water” background, except instead of blocks, you cause ripples in the water.

What’s also neat are the two virtual sound meters, which act as a visualizer for whatever music you’re currently playing on your phone. There’s one analog one that looks like one of the old ones with a red needle, and a “digital” one that looks similar to ones you see elsewhere. Sorta neat in itself, but it shows that the interactive backgrounds can actually interact with apps, as long as one knows the other’s APIs.

Other bits

The 5-megapixel camera is nice, and the flash works well enough for a flash on a phone, but it’s not spectacular, as seen by early photos taken and uploaded online by Googlers. There is autofocus, and you activate it with the trackball on the face of the phone. There is no tap-to-focus as see on the iPhone 3GS.

There’s no multitouch in the browser or in the map, but I think at this point that’s more of a legal consideration than a technical one, since many phones that run Android have the capability of supporting multitouch on a hardware level.

Playing back music over the speakers sounded decent, but not great. It’s definitely in need of a dock—like all smartphones—if you want to listen to music for a sustained period.

I didn’t get a chance to call on it, because I wanted to keep this as anonymous as possible, and didn’t want any sort of way to trace when I used the phone. From what other people say in their time with it, it functions fine as a phone, and should work as normally as other Android phones in the SMS/MMS department.

So what’s this all mean?

If Google’s planning on releasing this phone as their official Google phone, it’ll certify them as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it. And face it, some people didn’t like the Droid’s keyboard because it was too flush and the keys were too unseparated with each other. N1’s onscreen keyboard felt fine, and the speedy processor made sure that each key was interpreted well.

But in the end, it’s still an Android phone. If you want Android phones, this is the one to get, provided Google goes ahead with the rumored plans of either selling it themselves or partnering with T-Mobile in a more traditional role. Droid, shmoid; Nexus is the one you’re looking for.

Image courtesy anonymous tipster

Our buddy Tnkgrl just had a sit down with Google and HTC’s lovedroid, the Nexus One. She “wasn’t allowed” to take pictures or video but she came away with plenty of detail. The biggest point of clarification might not be what’s included in the handset, but what’s missing: multitouch. She confirms, “no multitouch support in the browser or in Google Maps,” just like Verizon’s Droid (but available on its European Milestone brother). The unit she tested included a 4GB microSD card, 1400mAh battery, worked on T-Mobile’s 3G only (AT&T is limited to EDGE data), and was “super snappy! Faster than the Droid.” She also noted “gold contacts” along the bottom edge presumably for a docking port thus jibing with whispers of a Nexus One Car Dock accessory. Now hit the read link for all the details if you still have the strength.

P.S. We should probably clarify that while the Google Apps tested don’t respond to multitouch, the OS and hardware are presumably multitouch capable. See our previous exhaustive analysis of this topic if you’re wondering why.

Google’s Nexus One lacks multitouch originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At last, the Googlephone has appeared. Forget the Droid, the G1 and all those other Android wannabees. Google will begin to sell its own reference Android 2.1 handset, designed by Google, made by hardware partner HTC, and called the Nexus One. The phone will be sold online by Google itself.

The Nexus One will, crucially, be sold unlocked, giving Google complete control over the hardware and software with no pesky carrier interference. Even the iPhone, which has had almost unprecedented autonomy in its functionality is still constrained by carriers: AT&T’s anti-tethering paranoia is a good example.

Although not yet officially announced, Google has coyly admitted that the phone is real and will be on sale early in the new year. In fact, it has provided the handset to its employees in order to test it out in the wild. The Google Mobile Blog explains, somewhat cryptically:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details. We hope to share more after our dogfood diet.

The phone is already in use. Nerdy John Gruber of Daring Fireball found this user agent string in his site’s logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD56C) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

It makes sense to identify yourself as Mobile Safari, if only to get proper mobile Webkit pages served to you.

Characteristically, and in contrast to Apple’s secrecy, photos of the Googlephone are already being posted openly by Googlers, or being handed to their friends. The picture above, posted on Twitpic by blogger Cory O’Brien, shows the handset (taken on an iPhone and with a BlackBerry in the background). According to O’Brien, “Google Phone = iPhone + a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android.”

The hardware specs are also leaking. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says that the Nexus will run on Qualcomm’s speedy Snapdragon chip, sport an OLED display, be thinner than the iPhone (with no physical keyboard) and feature two microphones along with a “weirdly large” camera.

Those hoping to get an iPhone-caliber phone on Verizon are out of luck. The Nexus will be a GSM phone, which means T-Mobile and AT&T in the United States. Worse, if you do opt for AT&T, your data connection could be EDGE-only. Gruber again, from Twitter: “The bummer I’m hearing about Nexus One: it’s GSM and unlocked, but on T-Mobile’s 3G band, so it works on AT&T but EDGE-only.”

According to the Media Memo blog at the Wall Street Journal, the choice to use GSM was prompted by Verizon’s refusal to carry the Nexus. Verizon already sells the Android-based Droid, but this odd decision looks like a repeat of the one made when the carrier turned down the iPhone.

This may turn out to be a Zune-like move, where Microsoft alienated hardware makers by ignoring PlaysForSure in favor of its own new DRM scheme. Or the Nexus could be a light that burns twice as bright as all the existing confusion of Android handsets combined, thus building a brand that can rival the iPhone. Either way, we won’t have to wait for long to see. The Nexus should be on sale in early January, and if these last two days are any indication, then Googlers will have “leaked” all the hardware and software well before the launch.

An Android dogfood diet for the holidays [Google Mobile Blog]

Photo: Cory O’Brien