Apple iPhone vs Google Nexus One: iPhone Wins First Round [Or Why Shouldn’t You Buy a Nexus One Android Smartphone Now]

Tweet

This is turning into a deja-vu feeling that I am not particularly fond of. Ever since Apple launched the first iPhone I was waiting to see the response of the competition. No cell phone maker was able to deal with Apple’s blow and come up with a decent, fun to be around, iPhone competitor.

Apple, who didn’t make any phones until the iPhone, managed to climb atop of the smartphone business with one simple yet very complicated gadget. We’ve seen the BlackBerry Storm announced as the true iPhone competitor. Then came the Palm Pre which everyone was waiting for in the first half of the year. Then came the Motorola Droid, which is, in my opinion, the only gadget that can truly stand a chance in front of the iPhone. And then most people anticipated, including yours truly, that the Google Nexus One was finally going to be the phone that could affect the iPhone dominance.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone had and still has its flaws, only it still manages to make a better impression than everyone else’s phone!

In other words, I was wrong again! You will notice how I left handsets like the HTC HD2, the Nokia N97, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 or the Samsung Omnia and Omnia II out of this comparison. They are all great devices but they are simply not running a competitive enough OS.

The Nexus One still has 3G problems and support forums are filled with complaints about it. Furtermore it lacks multitouch in the U.S. and the Android Market simply can’t be compared to the App Store. Will Google fix everything? I would imagine so, but the Nexus One failed to make a good first impression as two major requirements in the modern smartphone business: 3G support and multitouch, have not been flawlessly delivered.

Maybe Google hurried to launch the phone at the beginning of the year. Maybe a later launch would have given us a better device. While Android is still a major threat for Apple, Cupertino can rest assured for now that it will still dominate the smartphone business with its iPhone. And in less than three weeks, iPhone OS 4.0 could be unveiled and Google will have even more things to deal with.

The moral of the story is not to buy the Nexus One yet unless you want to chat a lot with customer care reps. Better sit on that cash and wait for everything to be fixed. In the mean time other phones will come out as MWC is right around the corner.