Greetings. Various media points are reporting fairly widespread complaints about customer support and technical problems related to Google's new Nexus One Android phone. The volume of postings appears to have been sufficient to trigger Google's "real time search" mode for the search term "nexus one complaints" at this time.

The customer support complaints seem to involve both pre- and post-sale issues, tales of finger-pointing between T-Mobile, HTC, and Google -- and a reported lack of other than (currently slow) e-mail support from Google related to the phone.

I do not know at this point the extent to which these complaints are or are not representative of the overall Nexus One user population. In these kinds of situations, you usually hear from the people with problems, not the folks who are satisfied. Of course, it's the former group who most need an effective support structure in such environments.

I did receive an unsolicited message from a reader (possibly reacting to my The Google "Nexus One" Saga Turns Ugly blog posting from yesterday) expressing incredulity that his Nexus One arrived with voluminous legal disclosure documentation but (he reported) no manual of any kind.

Concerns over the Nexus One's 3G performance appear to be piling up. Again, it is impossible to estimate at this time how representative these are, and of course any associated real problems (if actually related to the phone itself) could be caused by anything from hardware issues (usually a hassle to fix) to firmware issues (typically much easier to deal with).

Since my longstanding concerns and recommendations regarding Google's support structure in general are already quite well known, I won't go farther into that aspect here for now.

--Lauren--

Blog Update (January 11, 2010): Google's Customer Support Dilemma Intensifies