The hype machine surrounding the Nexus One is starting to wind down – and in some ways a negative hype machine is starting to get going. Any way you cut it, Google needs something else for people to focus on. And according to Reuters, it has announced that the Nexus Two will be an enterprise device. But the biggest competition Google may have to face in this space is itself.
Hold up… Nexus Two?
The Nexus One is the first mobile device to come from Google – and it was all about convergence. Just look at the logo:
It’s four arrows, all pointing toward the centre. Towards the nexus. This is where all of Googles separate technologies combine into one device. So “nexus” is a very apt brand name.
And since it was called the Nexus One, we always assumed there would be a Nexus Two.
(…and, we must assume, eventually there will be a Nexus Six)
The Nexus Two
Andy Rubin is the Vice President of Engineering at Google, and is one of the main heads behind Googles open source mobile operating system: Android. He is one of the founders of the OS, and is in charge of overseeing its development at Google. This is the man who has claimed that the next device in the Nexus series will be aimed at enterprise and SME customers.
What are the details?
None so far! Apart from the fact that the source here is Rubin himself, there’s very little to go on. He claims that the Nexus Two will have a physical keyboard – though there’s no indication of whether that will be a slide-out, like the CLIQ, or mounted on the front of the phone like the Blackberry and Nokia E70 series.
What we think?
Enterprise is a powerful force in mobile. Just look at Blackberry. Those phones have very little to recommend them in comparison with other devices currently on the market – except that they have strong ground root support in the business community. Blackberrys were the first devices to really offer fast, reliable synchronisation with email clients, and the full-QWERTY physical keyboard made it simple and fast to send emails in return. Since then, Blackberry has carefully maintained its business customers, and has done good business as a result.
So enterprise is not a bad direction to go in, obviously.
But there-in lies the problem. No one has really landed the enterprise crowd to the same extent that RIM has. Like I said, the Nokia E70 series is probably the best in terms of competition, but RIM has that early launch advantage over other enterprise devices (much the same way that iPhone has early launch advantage over other smartphones). Google will have to fight Blackberry and Nokia for a share of an already well-catered for market.
So what does Google have to offer that other platforms doesn’t? Access to Gmail? You can get that on other mobiles already. Google services? You can get those on other mobiles already. In fact, Google has gone about making its services so utterly ubiquitous that it’s own popularity could damage device sales. Why buy a new Google device when you can already get the services you need through other channels.
There will have to be some serious advantages to a Google enterprise device in order to get people to throw out their Blackberrys or Nokias. This is very much a “wait and see” situation.
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