Much is being made of a Flurry Analytics report showing that while the iPhone sold a million units in the first 74 days - and the Droid OVER a million - the Nexus One sold a slick 135,000. Flurry puts this down to the fact that Apple had a game-changer, and Droid had Verizon plus a holiday season - and that launching an unsubsidized phone in January may not have been the best move.
I concur entirely with this, with the extra caveat that you need to see the phone. The only way you see a Nexus One is if you know somebody with one; otherwise you buy a pig in a poke and hope for the best. In addition, this is America - which means subsidized phones, through the carrier. Apple tried to break through and didn't; the Nexus One is doing much the same (even with a partial T-Mobile subsidy for some units).
Furthermore, and importantly: iPhone and Droid were supported by major carriers at launch. Having a Nexus One on AT&T and Verizon will go a long way toward improving those numbers. I wonder if the deal with Verizon is being impeded, though, by both the Droid and by the relative difficulty of buying your own phone and putting it on CDMA (relative to the ease of buying an unlocked GSM phone and popping in the SIM).
