Even as the government attempts to bail itself out, the rise of the iPhone 5 along with its looming release date is seeing at least one retailer trying to pull off a bailout out of inventory of the Android phone known as the Nexus S. That bailout for Best Buy comes in the form of free Nexus phones for those who show up quickly enough at its stores this week, as units are tossed out the door at no charge with contract. The move comes as data from a revered Wall Street analyst from Piper shows that a shocking forty-plus percent of current Android users plan to switch to the iPhone 5 once Apple finally gets around to setting a date for its release, despite the fact that the iPhone 5 certainly won’t be given away for free.
It’s not quite a fair comparison, as the iPhone 5 is new and shiny (at least we think it’s shiny; we’ll see what Apple ends up unveiling) while the Nexus S is a little more than half a year old. But the contrast between the two phones highlights the frail nature of Android popularity. While all Android-based phones combined are arguably outselling the iPhone (Google’s controversial Android activation claims would be given more credit if they were backed up with documentation of actual phone sales), the iPhone 4 has been slaughtering the sales of each of the various Android phone lines individually. Verizon’s Droid lineup, for instance, was being outsold by a five to two margin by AT&T’s iPhone 4 at the time Verizon finally broke down and adopted the iPhone 4 as its flagship phone as well. But the real heart of Android’s problem can be seen with the Nexus line in particular.
The original Nexus One was a historical flop. It showed that while carrier-backed Android phones (like Verizon’s Droid, Sprint’s HTC EVO, T-Mobile’s G2, etc) have done well, Android phones which aren’t actively promoted by a carrier have failed miserably. The planned Nexus Two was canceled and replaced with the current Nexus S. How well has it done? That goes back to Android phone manufacturers conspiring to keep total phone sales a secret, only releasing isolated data over limited timespans when it suits them. But there’s no evidence suggesting that the Nexus S has fared any better than the Nexus One before it. And now that Best Buy is literally giving away its Nexus S inventory to anyone who shows up just to get rid of it, it appears that the retail giant is seeing the same trend that independent studies have been consistently showing: now that the iPhone 5 is set to debut simultaneously on both of the largest U.S. carriers (with a similar script playing out in other nations), Android users are overwhelmingly set to bail themselves out of the platform in favor of moving to the iPhone and its iOS 5 platform.
The reasons for the shift are various. There’s the aforementioned iPhone 5 carrier expansion, which sees those who wanted an iPhone all along, but settled for Android because that’s all their carrier had, now in position to finally get the phone they want. Then there’s the multiple data points showing widespread dissension among Android users in general. Last year, a study showed seventy-two percent of Android users vowing not to buy another Android phone in the future, and now that the iPhone 5 is upon them, more recent studies show that most of them still mean what they said. Of course that’ll require their upcoming deeds to match their deeds. But now we know that Best Buy, whose geek-laden sales staff leans as hard toward Android and away from iPhone as it can get away with, is betting that there will be no one to sell the Android Nexus phone to once the iPhone 5 sees its release date next month. And if Best Buy is giving up on its pet Android platform, then it’s perhaps the strongest sign yet that the air may be about to remove itself from the bubble.
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