The UX matters: it’s the first thing potential customers see when a friend passes them their new phone in the pub. A well-designed UX is consistent, forgiving and rewarding; Nokia’s user experience was inconsistent, unforgiving and hostile. Nokia’s designers honed in with meticulous attention to the wrong detail. Apple’s iPhoneOS UI had some unusual features – smooth graphics that played transitions at 60-frames-per-second, thanks to a dedicated graphics chip. Instead of redesigning the entire UX, Nokia acquired expensive professional-grade video cameras to determine the animation speed, and having confirmed that yes, it was 60fps, tried to recreate the transitions.

A modern, top-notch, triple-A title costs many tens of millions of dollars to develop. If you have 60 or 100 people working for multiple years, it’s just really damn expensive. And, when there’s that kind of money on the line, there is an unavoidable degree of conservatism that comes in. You want to do things that you know people love and you want to make it better and polish it, but you really don’t have an opportunity to go off into left field—that’s really, really risky, and people don’t want to bet their company on things like that.

There have been zero -zero – official statements about Google selling the device to retailers or directly to consumers. There is a Wall Street Journal article which claims that this is the strategy Google is headed in, but the post contains a number of poorly sourced and suspect facts, so we say take it with a major grain of salt. Other reports say “what if” and “could.” That doesn’t make it so. As of right now, the only way to get this phone is to work for Google.