Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Nexus One Is a Total Flop











74 days after the iPhone was introduced at $600 a pop (six hundred dollars), one million were sold. The Droid, at $200: 1.05 million. The Nexus One? An estimated 135,000 units. By any measure, that's a total sales flop.

Sure, the Nexus One is only sold online and though T-Mobile, but 135,000 units is a ridiculously tiny amount. Especially when the Nexus One was announced for a long time on the most popular web page in the world: The Google home page. Only the Nexus One and Google's Chrome have been announced in that sacred place, which is used by a gigazillion people every day. It's the most watched, most expensive advertising spot on the planet.

Even worse: The sales rate is declining. After its first month, the Nexus One sold80,000 units. That's means that only 55,000 additional units sold in the next month. For a cellphone that is being named and talked about every single day by every single tech publication, and often mentioned in the mainstream media, that's quite embarrassing.

Why is this happening? The Nexus One is a nice cellphone, after all. Is it really that you can only buy it online? The iPad sold online, for a higher price and without no phone capabilities, yet it sold an estimated 152,000 units in the first weekend. And products like the Kindle are doing good sales with an online-only sales model.

The problem doesn't seem to be about awareness of the product, either. According to Crowdscience latest market study:

Awareness of the Google Nexus One phone itself following launch was found to be 91% amongst iPhone users, 75% amongst Blackberry users, and 73% amongst users of other smartphones.

So, practically, most of the smartphone users out there know about the Nexus One.

Perhaps is a combination of reasons or something else we are missing, but somewhere in Cupertino, someone is laughing this morning. [Silicon Alley Insider]

No comments:

Post a Comment