Googlephone sales off to a sluggish start?
submitted by markodonoghue on 14 January 2010
A new report shows that Google sold a mere 20,000 Nexus One smartphones during its first week of availability. If you compare that with Apple's iPhone 3GS at 1.6 million, it's pretty clear that Google haven't done as well as what they thought they would.
The Android handset's debut was nothing like that of the iPhone 3GS. The Nexus One is only available through Google's new online store and ships only to the US and three other countries. When the iPhone was launched last June, it was available in eight countries and could be found both at Apple Stores and in network carrier's storefronts.
Maybe this is partly due to Nexus One not at all meeting the sales figures of the iPhone 3GS.
More to the point, 20,000 in the first week? Even T-Mobile's Android-based myTouch which launched last August with a fraction of the Nexus One's pre-release hype, bagged an estimated 60,000 sales during its first week.
Even Motorola's Droid, carried by Verizon, hit 250,000 first-week sales. The Droid benefited from a long and expensive pre-launch ad campaign, but you'd think Google's name recognition and high profile brand would have resulted in more than a mere 20,000 early adopters.
Other factors must be going against the Nexus One, buyers may be reluctant to trust their phone's support to a customer-service noob such as Google. And according to more than one report of poor service, that reluctance appears to be justified.
Plus, the Nexus One is sold only online. An Android smartphone is an unfamiliar piece of kit to the average customer, one that could best be explained by an actual in-the-flesh expert. Potential Nexus One purchasers who aren't handset geeks are turning away from buying one without giving it a test run under the guidance of an Android-trained salesperson.
Apple has well over 100,000 apps in its App Store and Google has just about a tenth of that. Ok so Apple's App Store has been around far longer than Googles, but surely Google aren't a company which has limited ideas, look what they have been doing recently with buying out other companies and creating new features online and etc. I would expect them to create a proper customer support team which doesn't talk in binary - 1001101101001100100111101100...
Maybe Google is just attempting to enter the smartphone market slowly instead of suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Not too sure if that's a wise move or not, but Google are experienced in releasing products whether that be online or not. Time will tell if the search engine giants Google can battle on in the smartphone market and actually see improvements.
Submitted by:
Mark O'Donoghue
Associated Links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/13/slow_nexus_one_sales/
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