Google’s Lame Excuse for Not Offering LTE on Nexus 4

Matthew Panzarino:

I do not think that the writers at The Verge are being intentionally apologist. I have too much respect for the staff there and neither Bohn nor Patel has a history of that kind of thing. However, the article as written is nowhere near as hard enough on Google for not delivering LTE in the Nexus 4 as it should be. And it manages to almost completely avoid what should have been the big elephant in the room: Apple has managed to ship a flagship phone with almost no carrier compromises and LTE, so why can’t Google?

Open always wins.

Update: I’m not trying to be all that glib here. The real explanation for why the Nexus 4 doesn’t have LTE but the iPhone 5 does is indeed easy: the iPhone’s massive popularity gives Apple leverage over the carriers that Google doesn’t have because Nexus phones have never sold in meaningful numbers. But the point Panzarino and others have made is that it’s no one’s fault but Google’s own that they don’t have this leverage, because they ceded control over Android to the carriers in the name of market share. “Android” has thus become wildly successful as a phone platform, but the true Android experience exactly as Google defines it languishes in obscurity.

Google can make up all the excuses they want about why the Nexus 4 doesn’t have LTE, but the simple answer is that it wasn’t up to them. It was up to the carriers, and the carriers said no.

★ Friday, 2 November 2012