After all the hype and speculations around Google’s new phone, the company made the official announcements yesterday. There has already been tons of reviews of the new phone, so we won’t repeat that material here. If you are interested, Engadget has an excellent review here.

What we are here to talk about is what does the Nexus One mean for Google and the Android Community?

Here are our main thoughts:

  • Nexus One is largely a yawner as far as the phone goes. Sure, it’s got some nice updates and is worthy of the title "Best Android Phone yet", but it is definitely not a major breakthrough.
  • Google’s goal with Nexus One is NOT to compete with the iPhone. In fact, I would go as far as to say Google doesn’t really care if Nexus One doesn’t sell that well. More importantly, Google is using Nexus One to give Android a better brand and to serve as a reference design to kick the other OEMs into making better Android devices.
  • Google’s move to sell the phones direct to consumers unlocked is very interesting. This lays the ground for future Google phones to be sold direct to consumers.

So what’s the coming breakthrough from Google?

We are not saying Google is not doing anything breakthrough. We are just saying that they are not doing it yet with Nexus One. Here is the killer scenario that Apple, mobile operators and the whole industry would fret:

Google makes a first-class smartphone that has Google Voice and Gizmo5 deeply integrated into the dialer. The phone will support voice over data network primarily via WiFi and Whitespace, but may fall back to cellular network. Google sells this phone directly to consumers over the web unlocked. This scenario would be killer because users would be able to cut their subscription fee significantly (up 80% to 90%), still get an awesome experience with using a smartphone and arguably better with Google Voice’s features.

We don’t think Google is too far from delivering this.

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