Google’s Nexus One Slow Out of the Gate

With all of the press in the gadget and Internet marketing world last week around the introduction of the Google Nexus One smart phone you would think that there would be a rush to buy them. Appears that is not the case, at least not initially. My theory is that while there was all kind of chatter amongst the industry, they would be the most likely to buy one but they are not going to commit to a new phone and platform if they are already an iPhone user. Oh, and the VAST majority of people simply don’t run out and buy everything that is launched.

So what’s the lesson here? It’s that the iPhone has the regular consumer’s mind and the Google phone has reached just the industry folks. While we are quick to grant ourselves some special status in the world the sheer numbers are not there to make a real splash out of the gate, especially with the iPhone having a nice lead in the market. Ask the average consumer about this phone and they’ll respind with “Google has a phone?”

So how bad was it? ReadWriteWeb tells us

Just one week after Google launched the Nexus One, its entry into the smartphone field, the numbers are in and it doesn’t look to be keeping up with the competition. We reviewed the iPhone-competitor the other day and see it as a formidable challenger, but sales numbers from its first week fall drastically short of those same numbers for other smartphones during their first week, according to statistics from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry details the methods used to arrive at these numbers in its blog post and is certain to call the data an estimate. But if they are even close to correct, the Droid, myTouch 3G and iPhone 3GS outsold the Nexus One by a factor, respectively, of 12, three and 80

Yup, that’s right. The iPhone outsold the Nexus One at an 80-1 clip. No matter what the reasons are for this poor showing like $500 for the device with no service contract, little marketing (although you wouldn’t know that if you spend enough time in this industry) or additional early termination fees this is good old fashioned “butt kickin’”.

Did you buy one? If you didn’t why not?