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Nexus One? Nexus Six Is Google Phone You Want
The rumored name for the new Google phone, Nexus One, has some Philip K. Dick fans up in arms. Is it too similar to the Nexus-6 brain unit from Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Let's compare features; first, the Nexus One smartphone.
(Nexus One photos (rumored))
According to rumors, the Nexus One smartphone will support North American GSM bands (850 and 1900) and T-Mobile's 1700 3G network. Documentation made available to the FTC suggests that the Nexus One will support hearing aids, a microSD card slot, Bluetooth, and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.
Update 18-Dec-2009: According to a recent post on These Are The Droids, information can be found in the Android 2.1 ROM:
- Proximity Sensor/Light Sensor: Capella CM3602 per sensors.mahimahi.so in Nexus One ROM Dump.
- Accelerometer: BMA150 3-axis Accelerometer per sensors.mahimahi.so in Nexus One ROM Dump.
- Magnetic Compass: AK8973 3-axis Magnetic field sensor/AK8973 Orientation sensor per sensors.mahimahi.so in Nexus One ROM Dump.
- Wifi Radio / Bluetooth / FM: BCM4329 in lib/modules
- In libaudio.so I found “Routing audio to Speakerphone with back mic” reference.
- In libaudio.so I found “Stereo FM speaker” also referenced.
- Audience A1026 Noise Canceling Chip – No link but here is the A1024 found in libaudio.so
- Qualcomm QSD8K Specific hardware libs in lib/hw (QSD8250 Probably)
- Adreno 200 Graphics Core with OpenGLES 2.0 – Part of Snapdragon?
- Camera Info Vague, found some references to auto focus, flash, white balance and anti-banding in libcamera.so
End update.
Now, the Nexus 6 from Dick's 1968 novel:
(Roy Batty debates saving Rick Deckard in Blade Runner)
The Nexus-6 did have two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no intelligence test could trap such an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not since the primordial, crude varieties of the 1970's.
(Read more about the Nexus-6)
Featurewise, you might want to wait for Google's Nexus Six.
On the other hand, the New York Times reports that
"... Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick, said in an interview Tuesday that she was “shocked and dismayed” by reports indicating that the Google phone would be named after her father’s famous characters. “We were never consulted, no requests were made, and we didn’t grant any sort of permissions.”"
So, you may never see a Google Nexus Six.
Via Engadget and Phonescoop and New York Times
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 12/16/2009)
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