Google Dismisses Nexus Two & Chrome OS Nexus Tablet
“The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn’t have to do a second one. We would view that as positive but people criticised us heavily for that. I called up the board and said: ‘Ok, it worked. Congratulations – we’re stopping’. We like that flexibility, we think that flexibility is characteristic of nimbleness at our scale.”
We get Schmidt’s quarrel here, though think he’s wrong. The Nexus One – while originally an online sales failure – has been a hit with techies and Apple’s new iPhone 4 sales model shows offering an unlocked phone which has straight access to the newest firmware can sell like hotcakes.
The bad news doesn’t end there though, since Schmidt also said the rumoured Chrome OS tablet is unlikely:
“We’ve talked about it. We have a reference spec for Chrome OS, we have a couple of hardware partners all lined up and the open source is all out there. It’s on schedule and it will happen later this year. Let’s see how well those partners do first. My guess is we won’t need to. The PC industry is different from the phone industry. The PC industry is used to working with Microsoft, whereas the mobile industry was not used to working with software.”
In all justice a Google specific Chrome OS tablet is dissimilar to the Nexus One. Unlike Android, Chrome OS is meant to be nearly imperceptible: a minimalistic gateway to the Internet via a easy browser. That said, given the technical tour de force that was the Nexus One, we’d have liked to see what sort of tablet Google would have come with.
