Nexus Two does (or doesn't) exist, is (or isn't) being released this year
After going most of the year with very little noise on the Nexus One's successor -- a phone Google has never committed to making, by the way -- we've gotten a handful of conflicting rumors about this thing in the past few days. Let's take a swipe at the buzz that's circulating this week:
British publication City A.M. says the Nexus Two is a Carphone Warehouse exclusive, will be released in time for the holidays, and probably won't be made by Samsung.
Android and Me is convinced that the Nexus Two will in fact be a Samsung product, will be announced at its November 8th press conference, will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread (assuming 3.0 is Honeycomb), and will be available on multiple carriers.
Meanwhile, a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt from back in July may suggest there will be no Nexus One successor at all:
"The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn't have to do a second one."
Of course, he goes on to say that the Nexus One's sudden sunset was a shining example of Google's "nimbleness" -- and since the quote is from nearly four months ago, there's little reason to doubt that the company could've easily done a 180 since then, particularly since we're sure they'd like to have a clean, skin-free, and possibly carrier-free device to showcase Gingerbread. At any rate, time's running out to get a product advertised and available in time to catch holiday buyers... so this'll all have to shake out pretty quickly.
Update: Gizmodo says "a friend of [theirs] got to play with it," and they describe it as basically a Samsung Galaxy S with a front-facing camera and a stock build of Gingerbread that's still "really buggy." Is that really what you want to bring to the table as your Gingerbread flagship, Google?
