1:39 PM
Next-generation phone runs 'Gingerbread' 2.3 version of Android and will cost £550 unlocked or £35 per month
Google is returning to the branded phone fold with the launch of the Nexus S, built by Samsung, which will be sold in the UK through Carphone Warehouse and in the US via the retail chain Best Buy - a tacit admission that its previous attempts to sell the phone through a website failed due to lack of customer support.
The Nexus S, which will be branded in adverts as 'Pure Google', will be the first to feature Google's latest 'Gingerbread' 2.3 release of its Android phone operating system. It includes the ability to do searches and create texts and emails from voice commands - although initially this functionality will only be available in the US.
Carphone Warehouse is taking orders for the phone from today, but could not be definite about when it will be able to sell it - although it hopes to be able to begin deliveries before Christmas.
The phone will be available unlocked for £550 (compared to £500 for Apple's iPhone 4) or for free from £35 per month, according to Graham Stapleton, CPW's chief commercial director, who says that the retailer is talking to networks in the UK to set up deals.
Stapleton said that Android phones are already the second best-selling operating system on phones in its thousand-odd retail outlets throughout Europe, but that for this quarter he expects it to be the top-selling OS through the chain, pushing Nokia's Symbian OS on both smartphone and 'dumb' phones into second place. Nokia has dominated the market for phone for years, selling a greater share than any other platform, but since the launch of Apple's iPhone and devices built on Android its share in Europe has dwindled.
Industry sources suggested that CPW's decision to talk to networks about phone contracts, rather than selling the phone directly and supporting it on its own mobile network, indicate that it recognises the need for aftersales support will be greater than it can manage on its own.
Google's first venture into own-branded phones, the Nexus One in January, was initially sold only via Google's website, but the company quickly discovered that the level of after-sales support required overwhelmed it. It then spun off sales to retailers before discontinuing it entirely in July.
The Nexus S has a 4-inch screen which uses a Super AMOLED screen, which offers greater brightness and battery life than previous screen displays. The phone also has a gyroscope, near-field communications for contactless data transfer, and introduces methods for controlling many aspects of the phone purely via voice commands. Existing Android 2.2 phones can already do simple web searches from voice commands, but the 2.3 release extends that to other functions in the phone.
To begin with only services that translate voice commands for navigation and finding contacts will be available through the voice-to-text facility. But Google hopes to offer extra facilities - including creating a text or email from spoken sentences, setting alarms and 'listen to' services which will find music online or on the phone - in the UK and worldwide from next year.
'One in four searches on Android devices in the US is already done by voice, which is an astonishing number to me,' Burke said.
The phone uses a 1GHz processor running at the same speed as the Nexus One, but offers greater on-chip bandwidth and a ddicated graphics processing unit, meaning it can process data much more quickly, said Dave Burke, Google's head of smartphones in the UK.
Burke said that the 2.3 Gingerbread release will be available to owners of the Nexus One and other phones as an over-the-air update 'within the next few weeks'. However it will be up to mobile operators how quickly they roll it out, although future upgrades for the Nexus S will be controlled by Google.
The Nexus S also takes advantage of facilities in Android 2.3 which include native support for voice-over-internet calls when connected to a Wi-Fi network. Burke acknowledged that some network operators might choose to remove that functionality from their own builds of Android for phones they sell in future. 'That's the Android open model - people can change the software,' he said."
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