“Superphone”

Google’s rival to Apple’s iPhone hits the market to a fanfare of adulation and scepticism in equal measure – but can it live up to its “superphone” tagline? “On a day of hoopla at Google’s headquarters in California, executives at the company called the Nexus One the first ‘superphone’, a device able to surf the web at high speeds and with many voice-activated features. They have set the price for an unlocked phone, able to run on any network, at $529, and said it was already available from its website to buyers from the US, the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. ‘You will see it pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today,’ said Peter Chou, chief executive of HTC, which is manufacturing the phone for Google. Noise-cancellation technology, a 3.7in touch-screen and a 5-megapixel camera with flash set the Nexus One apart from Apple’s iPhone, but Google executives concede that much depends on whether application developers create new applications (apps) for the phone in greater numbers.”