Nexus One – Google Phone

Google lauched Nexus One on on January 5, 2010. Singapore, is one of the few countries together with USA, UK and Hong Kong, that Google is making the phone available for delivery to.

Here are some of the phone details.

Pricing & Availability

• USD$529 (without contract)
• USD$179 (with 2 years contract from T-Mobile USA)

Verizon Wireless in the US and Vodafone in Europe plan to bring in the Nexus One as well during Spring 2010. The Nexus One will ship to three international market at the moment, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Shipping To Singapore
If you are living in Singapore and interested to get the Nexus One, here is the price breakdown for you:

• Nexus One phone (without contract): USD$529
• AC Adapter (Singapore): USD$19.99
• DHL International (Shipping & Handling): USD$28.32
• Total: USD$577.31 or SGD$806.10 (USD$1 = SGD$1.3963)
• After adding in 7% GST: SGD$862.52

Hardware Specifications

• Display: 3.7″ AMOLED 480×800 WVGA display
• Thinness: 11.5mm; Weight: 130g
• Processor/Speed: Qualcomm Snapdragon 3G QSD8250 chipset, delivering speeds up to 1GHz
• Camera: 5 megapixel auto focus with flash and geo tagging
• Onboard memory: 512MB Flash, 512MB RAM
• Expandable memory: 4GB removable SD Card (expandable to 32GB)
• Noise Suppression: Dynamic noise suppression from Audience, Inc.
• Ports: 3.5mm stereo headphone jack with four contacts for inline voice and remote control
• Battery: Removable 1400 mAh
• Personalized laser engraving: Up to 50 characters on the back of the phone
• Trackball: Tri-color notification LED, alerts when new emails, chats, text messages arrive

Software Innovation

• Google Maps Navigation: offering turn-by-turn driving directions with voice output.
• Email: multiple Gmail accounts; universal inbox and Exchange support.
• Phone book: aggregate contacts from multiple sources, including Facebook.
• Quick Contacts: easily switch between communication and social applications.
• Android Market: access to more than 18,000 applications.
• Enter text without typing.
• Use a voice-enabled keyboard for all text fields: speak a text message, instant message, tweet, Facebook update, or complete an email.
• Tell your phone what you want it to do.
• Search Google, call contacts, or get driving directions by just speaking into your phone.
• Take personalization to the next level.
• Dynamic, interactive, live wallpapers react to the touch of a finger.
• More widgets and five home screen panels allow for further device customization.
• Capture camera-quality pictures and video with your device.
• 5 megapixel camera includes LED flash, auto focus, zoom, white balance and color effects.
• View pictures and Picasa Web Albums in the new 3D Gallery.
• Record Hi-Res MPEG4 video, and then upload to YouTube with one click.
• Read your voicemail messages.
• Get transcribed voicemail with Google Voice integration, without changing your number.

Google announces goo.gl, URL Shortener

Google, the company that made searching on the web synonymous with it's brand, the company behind gmail and android.
They seem to be expanding into an increasing number of markets daily. With the last couple of weeks busy, with many announcements made. Today, another was made, regarding its new & free URL shortening service, goo.gl, for use within its other products.

URL shorteners are great for services like Twitter, where characters are counted in posts, or for when a fully-sized link would look rather out of place. There tons of alternatives to choose from, but at the moment, there are only a few very popular ones (such as bit.ly). Google's new offering is only available through its own products, according to the blog post on the subject, but it comes with a few benefits, listed below.

• Stability: Google's scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we've worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We'll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

The proper link for the site, goo.gl, has nothing much to offer (as the service is limited to a couple products), but you can test out the Google URL Shortener (the official name) by using the Google Toolbar or FeedBurner.

Google announces new OS. Microsoft to respond next Monday?

Google has announced plans to release a Chrome based OS. This new OS is an open source, lightweight OS targeted at netbooks. Google plans to offer this OS later on in 2010.

As Windows 7 RTM draws near (July 13), Blogger Robert Scoble has posted a message on his FriendFeed account, hinting at a Microsoft announcement next Monday, related to Google's OS.

In the posting, Scoble notes "why did Google announce Chrome OS this week? Well, of course, Microsoft has a big announcement coming on Monday (I'm embargoed)".

Source: Google