This becomes pretty obvious when you read their blog announcing the URL/store/Nexus One carefully.<p>Notice that they mention the online store prior to the Nexus One:<p><i>Well, today we're pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.<p>The first phone we'll be selling through this new web store is the Nexus One ... It's the first in what we expect to be a series of products which we will bring to market with our operator and hardware partners and sell through our online store.</i><p>(quoting this here because I didn't see it directly quoted in the Ars article)<p><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-new-approach-to-buying-mobile-phone.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-new-approach-to-b...</a>
This also might reveal why Verizon's continued support of the CDMA island effectively exempts it from having to compete with carrier-unlocked phones.<p>It's frustrating as a consumer that Verizon is incompatible with the massive hordes of unlocked GSM phones, but it might be a business advantage in the short-term for Verizon. In the long term, people who want phones like Nexus One will just switch carriers.
How long before google launches their own mobile carrier?<p>There are plenty of smaller parties in Europe they could gobble up to get a foothold, gain experience with the tech and the roll out on a much larger scale.
I really hope this article is spot on and we'll soon see carriers adopt this trend in the US as they do overseas. I've long lusted after various Sony phones (if only for their aesthetics), but I've never actually bothered to look into how good they are. You can't get them on Verizon and it's the only carrier I'll deal with at the moment. I would love to be able to choose nearly any phone I wanted to use on Verizon's network.<p>Surely there are larger cell phone manufacturers that could've forced this issue a long time ago, but none of them have stepped up to do so, or so it would seem. So I'm all for Google giving it a shot and I'll keep my fingers crossed that others follow suit.
> In short, what Google announced today wasn't just the Nexus One, but the world's first carrier-independent smartphone store; the Google store is now the only smartphone store in the US where, for every phone on offer, you first pick which phone you want, and then you pick a network and a plan on that network.<p>Except for all the other stores that do the very same thing. What a strange article.
I wonder why Verizon is coming soon but Sprint is never mentioned. Is Sprint going to lock the Nexus One out of its network even when a CDMA version is available?