No one was sure what to make of Google, a search engine, getting into the mobile phone business. It was one thing for it to make and support the Android OS, but what did Google know about smartphones? The Nexus One launched with considerably hoopla and did get plenty of kudos for being a slick phone. But Google has hardly been marketing it, and it shows in fairly anemic sales.
But is it fair to label the Nexus One a failure at this point? There might be more to the situation than just the numbers. EnterpriseMobileToday takes a look.
Slow and steady may work for the tortoise against the hare, but sluggish sales of Google’s Nexus One smartphone has the blogosphere calling its approach a failure.
The latest Nexus One sales stats come courtesy of mobile computing market research firm, Flurry, which decided to take the pulse of Nexus One sales at the 74-day mark. Why 74 days? As Peter Farago, Flurry’s vice president of marketing put it in his blog entry, it took Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) 74 days sell one million units of the original iPhone back in 2007.
Google, meanwhile, has sold only about 135,000 Nexus One units, according to Flurry.
“The comparison is interesting because the iPhone and Nexus One each represent Apple and Google’s first fully branded handsets, respectively,” Farago wrote in his blog post.
