Google needs awareness not hype. Now that the Nexus One is unveiled the real work begins.

As I’m sure you know by now, Google finally revealed the Nexus One to the world yesterday evening – or in the middle of the night, here in Ireland. Gadget lovers, mobile phone followers and Android fanatics all over the world rejoice! But tech lovers, bloggers and journalists are easy to whip into a frenzy with a device like the Nexus One. Google is going to have a much harder job convincing the buying public that the device is worth forking out for.

First of all, the Nexus One:

Thanks to Googles policy of slow-dripping unofficial information about the device out (including giving actual devices out the employees over Christmas), almost all of the speculation about the device specs was accurate. It is indeed operator independent, available as a SIM free, unlocked device straight from Google for just over $529 (£331 in the UK). There are some operator centric aspects to the phone though. You can get it from T-Mobile if you want, at a much cheaper $179 with the now-standard 24 month contract for a high-end smartphone.

As for the physical properties of the device, let’s get them down in condensed form:

Most up-to-date version of Android
3.7-inch, high-res touchscreen
Very powerful 1GHz processor from Qualcomm
5-megapixel camera
Advanced social networking and GPS features

It’s mostly the same as any other smartphone on the market. It has a nifty little voice-to-text ability, it must be said. Using two microphones to create a noise-reducing feature, it allows you to enter text into absolutely any text field you encounter through the phone by speaking to the phone.

Now, the real work:

From the sheer hype surrounding the Nexus One, you might have expected it to be the alpha and the omega of all smartphones. Which it isn’t, obviously – it certainly is an incredibly nice machine but it isn’t going to kick the door in any time soon. And that’s the thing about hype. Google is great at managing that kind of word-of-mouth advertising. But where does it go from here? On a trip to the US last year, I caught a bus from a major station in Boston. The lobby of this place was a single massive warehouse-like space, with hundreds of passengers eating and shop in the large number of retail spaces. And this entire vast room was decked with iPhone banners, displaying the iconic dancer-sillhouettes. Massive ads, 50 feet tall, hung in the air or splashed across walls. There wasn’t a single direction you could look in that you didn’t see some Apple and iPhone branding.

Does Google have the cash to create that huge an ad campaign? Walk out in the street right now and ask a random passer-by about the iPhone. Even if they don’t own one, they’ll know what you’re talking about. Now ask them about the Nexus One…

To be fair, not many people knew what an iPhone was when it had just launched. It took a while for it to become the household name it currently is. But it wasn’t just a matter of time – it was also a result of the truly massive advertising campaigns that Apple created.

Hype is much easier to create than genuine public awareness. Google masterfully sculpted a frenzy amongst the tech community, but I’ll be interested to see how it intends to translate that into household branding.

One last thing:

A big asset that Google has to use is it’s own service. Countless numbers of people use the Google website every single day. And judging by this image, an awful lot of them were looking for the Nexus One today: