Nexus out, Android in

My dreams of a Nexus One came to naught. But...

I now have an excellent Samsung Galaxy S with Android 2.1, and I asked JetBrains for an open-source license for their Android plugin to IntelliJ IDEA. I have plans brewing!

Update on Google Phone saga

An update from Google on my continuing Google phone quest:

XXX YYY has posted an answer to the question "Ineligible to purchase phone: T-mobile contract changed too recently": Howdy binkley, We've listened very carefully to everyone's feedback and concerns regarding the upgrade issue and are working with our partners to improve the situation for existing customers. In all instances, Google's web store only passes your information along. The carrier then determines eligibility for a full or partial upgrade, as your service contract is with the carrier. You must be fully upgrade eligible in order to get this device at a discount. Stay tuned for more updates about upgrading! In the meantime, you can use the sticky post at the top of this forum to get the latest information and share any more thoughts you may have: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=3c0fd3870ec370a8&#all Cheers, -XXX

UPDATE: I've received a variant of this text in a second message from another Google employee. It's good they are trying to deal with this mess. I should not be surprised at the form letter template employees work from.

Bad fanboi - no gphone

Continuing my Nexus One story...

So far I cannot get a Google phone. At first the site did not like my T-mobile family plan. So I went from $60/mo. to $130/mo. to break up our plan into a his/hers data/voice plan.

Now Google still does not like my T-mobile plan:

You are not eligible for an upgrade at this time.
You are not eligible because your current contract was initiated too recently.

No love from Google.

Nexus One URL almost there

What is the typical error page for a bad link into Google, say, http://www.google.com/bobsyerunkel? But for http://www.google.com/phone I get a prosaic default 404 page, perhaps in preparation for something more interesting later today.

UPDATE: Not happy! http://www.google.com/phone works now, but T-mobile is disabled as a choice. Only the unlocked phone is offered:

We're unable to sell T-Mobile service plans at this time, but you can still buy the unlocked phone.

This was my Christmas present from my wife!

UPDATE #2: I was premature. The T-mobile option now works, very nicely, too. However, it checked my existing T-mobile phone number and said family plans were not eligible. Time to confer with the wife.

UPDATE #3: Spent 20 minutes on line with T-mobile. She was courteous and did her best, but management left them unprepared for Nexus One release beyond a cursory memo. Several checks with different supervisors, still no answer on how to split family plan, add Nexus One plan for myself. There's always tomorrow.

Nexus One: Buy from Google, not T-mobile

I just spoke with my friendly T-Mobile customer care specialist. She was direct and helpful. Point blank I asked to pre-order a Nexus One and sign up for the matching phone plan. As expected, she could not help me with that. But she did tell me some interesting tidbits:

• T-mobile considers it an HTC phone, not a Google one
• T-mobile has not yet given customer service details on the phone, but my specialist did know about it
• T-mobile will not be selling the phone directly; she said I needed to order it from Google, not T-mobile

Anticipation is a great selling device.