The Google phone finally lands; Tablets brought down from the mountaintop

When the G1 wireless phone arrived in 2008, it was hailed as the vanguard of smartphones, taking advantage of Google‘s Android mobile device software. The promise of Android was more fully realized this week when Google debuted the Nexus One, a phone made by High Tech Computer (HTC) and designed by Google itself, not a handset manufacturer or a telecommunications carrier.

The big step taken with the Nexus One is that you can buy an “unlocked” version of the phone directly from Google, for $529. Pricey? Sure, compared with other phones on the market, but that price doesn’t come with the usual two-year service contract you get locked into when you buy a G1 or myTouch 3G, a Droid, or an iPhone. You can then take it to a wireless carrier and see what kind of deal they’ll cut you.

If you’re not ready for such a bold step, you can get a Nexus One from T-Mobile USA for $179 and the standard two-year contract.

The media reactions to the Nexus One were coolly detached — “It looks like an iPhone.” “I don’t like HTC phone designs.” “This is revolutionary?” “Yawn.” You’ll have to excuse the cynical, jaded industry analysts and news reporters. They get new smartphones thrown at them on an almost daily basis and unless the product comes with a stunning new feature — such as an app for stunning other people — it’s just another gadget.

As the name indicates, the Nexus One is the first in a series of phones to come from Google. And those crazy coders at the Googleplex are always turning out new iterations of Android. The Android Market doesn’t have as many applications as Apple‘s App Store? So what. Most people are looking for apps that will do something useful for them on their phones — not just novelties to impress your drinking buddies on the weekend.

Meanwhile, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is going on in Las Vegas this weekend, and the trend du jour from Sin City seems to be the plethora of tablet computers, also known as slate computers, coming out at the show in advance of Apple’s product introduction later this month. (Apple doesn’t need a big industry trade show, or even a focused convention like Macworld, to pull off a newsworthy event; it just sets the day, time, and place, and the fan boys, bloggers, and press flock in.)

A slate or tablet computer is a portable device, bigger than a smartphone and smaller than a notebook or laptop computer. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo Group, and Motorola are showing new tablets at CES, some of them running Microsoft‘s Windows 7 and some based on Android.

Tablet computers have been around for years in specialized applications, such as health care and industrial manufacturing. Vendors include Fujitsu, Motion Computing, Psion, Toshiba, and Xplore Technologies. The wrinkle is that these new tablets are targeted at business professionals and consumers. The products promise to be more useful than electronic readers, which are about the same size but are meant only for reading books and periodicals. The new wave of touchscreen-based, multimedia tablets can not only surf the Web, but also download music, play games, and stream videos.

What will the new Apple product do? You’ll find out soon enough.

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Photo by Shawn Collins, used under a Creative Commons license.