YashLabs

As expected, the first Google-branded phone launched today with a panel of invited bloggers and influencers, who each went home with both a Nexus One and a Sim Card to go with it.

One audience member asked “Where’s the disruption, You’re Google, if you can’t do it, who can?”, to which the reply was “Baby steps”. It’s all about going forward in your plans stealthily, and I guess things would have been very different had the AdMod acquisition gone through smoothly. Apple retaliated by acquiring Quattro Wireless today itself, showing us how the clash between these two titans is heating up right into the start of 2010 as I wrote earlier, but I wonder how Apple is going to meld ads into the user experience.

More disruption will occur when Google Voice and Google Talk and the Gizmo5 technology is integrated into the handset. Remember: it isn’t about the handset with Google. Google is leveraging its brand to change how you access Telecommunications. It’s about a vision of making business more efficient and grabbing market-share where others are sleeping on their laurels, and of course, serving the end-user.

Read the complete specifications. Some noteworthy ones:

Qualcomm’s 1GHz SnapDragon is there as planned in its QSD 8250 incarnation. This thing can support up to 12 Megapixels for the camera and a resolution of 1280×720

The gorgeous 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen has 800 x 480 pixels resolution with a whopping 100,000:1 contrast ratio.

Photos can be location-tagged thanks to the AGPS receiver and integration with YouTube is seamless

All the features for Augmented Reality apps are available as mentioned in my previous post

Google’s speech-to-text is included so you can, among other things search by voice or command Google Earth by voice (or any apps with text fields basically)

Try the 3D tour here: http://www.google.com/googlephone/tour/

Try the interface itself and order from here if you’re luckily living in the USA, Hong Kong and Singapore – No such luck for us Canadians as the message “Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country” attests:

http://www.google.com/phone

Price: US $529 unlocked, $179 with T-Mobile contract, and in spring, Verizon and Vodafone support are coming.

Multi-Touch support

Andy Rubin seemed to fumble a bit when asked about multi-touch on the Nexus One. “We’ll consider it” and “it’s a software issue” means that the hardware itself is capable of multi-touch.

In addition, the Dolphin browser supports multi-touch.

Flash support

Adrian Ludwig from Adobe Systems demonstrates the forthcoming Flash support (it’s not there out of the box), but Apple’s Flash support for the iPhone is still broken as I wrote previously.

Open handset alliance and Open-source

No doubt this first incarnation is going to be hacked (hacked as in optimized by the Android/open-source community) to death as it relies on open-source, and so I expect many enhancements to be forthcoming and frequent. Google announced that a growing number of companies have joined the Open Handset Alliance from which Apple and Microsoft are conspicuously absent.

More links to whet your appetite

Phandroid’s review – where the iPhone trumps both the Droid and the Nexus one in a browser page loading test with scrolling.

Tim O’Reilly’s long piece about it

TechCrunch’s review

Gizmodo’s overview.