Uh oh.
On at least a few occasions, Android developers have mentioned to me that the multi-touch sensors on certain Android handsets — especially the Nexus One — seemed a bit.. flaky. I’d had nothing but solid experiences while dabbling with multi-touch in all of the apps I could find that support it, so I chalked it up as a coding error on the developer’s part until something a bit more solid came forward.
Well, something a bit more solid has just come forward.
Well – not entirely. After all, it’s bright, responsive, and has a much higher resolution. But there is a lot more to making a good screen, and under a detailed analysis it’s far from a rout when you pit HTC’s bleeding-edge OLED screen against the old-school LCD of the iPhone.
Here is the basic list of complaints, which seem to be backed up by pretty credible evidence.
We had a brief chat with Opera Software product analyst Phillip Grønvold here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday. We had a conversation about the company’s plans to submit an Opera Mini iPhone app up for App Store approval, of which we posted the video yesterday.
Another thing we touched upon was the recently announced plans to provide handset manufacturers with a toolkit to get the company’s Opera Mobile product preloaded on Android devices. Grønvold demoed the app running on Google’s Nexus One phone, and we recorded the video of the app in action.
Currently, Google has one of the more interesting problems I’ve ever seen. While I’d never tell anyone to slow down their pace of innovation, with Android, I can’t help but wonder if Google might have to do just that — because it’s seriously starting to trip over itself.
This week’s Mobile World Congress is highlighting this exact problem. Yesterday, we saw not one, but two new sexy Android phones announced just by HTC alone. HTC, you may recall, is the manufacturer of the Nexus One, the Android phone that Google felt so comfortable with, it decided to sell itself. Now, just over a month later, at least one of these new phones, the Desire, is simply a better version of the Nexus One. Consumers must be getting whiplash at this point.
Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google’s carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).
This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. 
Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being “mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights” even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.
Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago. Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store.
As we noted earlier, Google announced an update today to its Android OS for Nexus One phones that would enable the pinch-to-zoom multi-touch feature for the first time in a few Google apps: Maps, Gallery, and the Web Browser. We’ve just received the update, which is technically firmware 2.1-update1, and have taken a video of the new functionality in action.
While some third-party apps have taken advantage of mutli-touch for some time on Android, Google has resisted the feature for its own apps — likely due to an agreement with Apple. But now, all bets appear to be off.
As great as Android phones are getting, there has been one major feature lacking that users have complained about: multi-touch. Yes, some third-party apps have been free to use it on certain devices, but the best Android apps, those made by Google, have all lacked it. Until now.
With the Android update announced for Nexus One phones today, Google has enabled multi-touch for its Browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. Specifically, they’ve enabled the popular pinch-to-zoom functionality that iPhone users are fond of. So why did Google wait all this time to implement this obvious feature when its devices have been capable of it since the G1? Well, a report last year (written by me for another publication), cited a source within Google who noted that Apple and Google had a gentleman’s agreement that Android wouldn’t encroach on what Apple believed to be its property, certain multi-touch gestures, like pinch-to-zoom. With Apple and Google now fighting, all bets are apparently off.
Google has just started to deploy an update to the Nexus One that brings a long-desired feature to Android: Multi-touch. In a blog post announcing the news, Google says that the new update will bring “Pinch-to-zoom functionality” to the Nexus One, which will allow users to pinch-to-zoom in the Android browser, Gallery, and Maps applications.
So does this mean that Multi-touch will be coming to all Android phones? Not quite yet. A Google spokesperson says that multitouch support is part of the Android 2.0 framework and that its integrated support on the Browser, gallery, and Maps applications will be part of the next Android update. However, it will be up to carriers and device manufactures to roll the updated software to these devices.
How much exactly is the Nexus One line of Android phones worth to Google? The folks at Trefis have modeled Nexus One sales into their financial forecast for Google and estimate that it will account for nearly $20 billion of Google’s market cap (based on its target price pf $659 per share), accounting for 9.3 percent of the total. That is more than its estimated contribution of ad and search partnerships (5.1 percent), Google Apps (3.2 percent) or YouTube (2.4 percent). Only search ads account for more of Google’s total value (68.1 percent).
How does Trefis come up with these numbers? Trefis is an investing site which comes up with financial models for stocks which translate into interactive stock charts and price targets. If you don’t agree with their model, you can change some of the underlying assumption sin the drag-able charts and create your own model (see below). Trefis is assuming Google will sell 5 million Nexus One phones this year, and that the Nexus One market share will grow from 0.4 percent this year to 3.4 percent in 2016, when the iPhone will have an 11.5 percent global mobile phone market share (as shown by the olive-colored line above) and Blackberry will have an 8.2 percent share (green line).