Google’s Nexus One smartphone promises a fantastic touchscreen interface and lightning-quick speed but if for some reason you decide it’s just not for you, T-Mobile and Google will hit you with a double whammy of early termination fees.
Another day, another Nexus One brouhaha. This time it’s over the revelation that if you purchase the phone with a T-Mobile account and cancel your service within a certain time window, not only do you pay an Early Termination Fee (ETF) to T-Mobile, you pay one to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) as well.
If that’s not hard enough to swallow, the size of the fee surely will be. The T-Mobile ETF is $200 and Google’s is $350. Combined with the $179 for the initial purchase, that puts Nexus One buyer’s remorse at $729. All for a device you can’t pick up and play with in a retail outlet (it’s only sold via a special Google Web site.)
Not surprisingly, this is causing quite a bit of outrage on some blogs. “WTF? was the most common reaction of readers to an article on Phanroid while MobileCrunch took the more humorous approach of “Prepare the foot soldiers from the Internet Nerd Rage army for this one.”