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Google is all set to come up with a new smartphone using its flagship Android operating system. Google had started the trend with Nexus 4 smartphones, in partnership with Korean electronics giant LG. The Nexus 5 was a runaway hit as it boasted of top specifications and a great design at a cutthroat price. The smartphone was available online without a contract and it did quite well, despite not being promoted heavily. Google wanted to popularize and show off its Android operating system. It also wanted to increase the competition amongst the smartphone vendors, using its Android operating system. The company then introduced another smartphone Nexus 6 with LG, despite owning Motorola at that point of time. The Nexus 6 smartphone was not priced very competitively and did not set the market on fire. Other smartphone vendors like Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi and Lenovo kept launching great smartphones using Android at increasingly low prices. These days you can find a new Android being launched almost every week. Most of these smartphones are great devices at extremely low prices. One Plus One, Asus Zerfone 2, Xiaomi 4i etc. are very good phones at stunningly attractive prices. They also support the latest Android operating system – Lollipop.
Digitimes reported that Google is going to plan its new Nexus smartphone and is looking at vendors for the same. LG is likely to lose, as Google is looking at Chinese vendors which have become leading smartphone companies. Lenovo, Huawei and others have sharply increased their global marketshare at the expense of established companies such as Samsung, LG, Blackberry, Nokia and others. Apple is the only smartphone company that has stood the Chinese onslaught.
I don’t know whether Google needs to sell the Nexus anymore. The Android market is extremely vibrant and competitive and I don’t think Nexus can bring anything special to the table. The whole raison de etre of Nexus has been met. Besides, the Nexus service has been quite pathetic, as Google does not provide after sales service on its own. The Nexus devices are suffering from issues after upgrades and some have become unusable. This is not doing Google any good. Google does not have much of a stake in the success of Nexus and it is showing in terms of the service. I think Google should just junk the Nexus line.
1 Comment
There is still 1 thing that Nexus phones do better than its competition…update itself to the latest android system updates when they come out. This has been 1 of the factors why I chose Nexus. Samsung’s Kies system just sucks and other phones that auto update on vanilla android do so very late.
Mfg’s trend of slapping on layers of uselesss functionality on top of android is a turn off for many. My (non-geek) gf recently decided against the new Samsung S6 simply because she hated her S4 android OS and heard so much good things about the Nexus vanilla Android from her friends.
So all in all, plain vanilla Android I think is still a big plus point for the Nexus range which you simply have not taken into consideration in your analysis.