The cost of cellphone service choice?

If people at your house think the Nexus One phone is cool, they're right, but they still need to think twice about various costs. The new Google phone is a pricey option to begin with: $539, "not including service fees by T-Mobile, Google's first service partner" if untethered from a T-Mobile service fee, the Washington Post reports. But if the buyer changes his or her mind and wants to end service early, the penalties "could amount to $550 in early equipment return and contract cancellation fees," the Post adds (not mentioning that T-Mobile does have a month-to-month plan with no termination fee, but probably higher-cost up front). This when the FCC is reviewing early termination fees at Verizon Wireless. Part of the cost of choice and being an early adopter, but he or she will want to make the adoption long-term! Another possible disincentive for parents looking at phones for their kids is Nexus One's lack of parental controls right now (this will change as apps proliferate for the phone). Speaking of third-party apps, there's soon-to-roll-out software from Taser for "a variety of smart phones" that will allow parents to see just about everything incoming and outgoing from a child's phone, described by ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid at CNET, asking if using it would be overparenting. Here, too, is a Common Sense Media video on how to set the parental controls Apple put on the iPhone and iPod Touch. [Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb.com cites a Gartner projection that mobile app stores will make $7 billion this year, up from $4.2 billion last year (even with about 80% of apps offered for free. Apple's App Store represents about 99% of the app biz right now.]

Big sign of increasingly mobile Web

If anyone had any doubts about how big the mobile Web will be, Google's release of its Nexus One phone should erase them. It's part of Google's "careful plan to try to do what few other technology companies have done before: retain its leadership as computing shifts from one generation to the next," the New York Times reports. And this shift is computing, shopping, gaming, info-gathering, communicating, photo-sharing, learning, teaching, producing, etc. on smart phones. Some pundits have been calling this "Web 3.0" (and I'm not sure what else Web 3.0 would look like). According to Nielsen, about 18% of mobile phones were smartphones last year (up from 13% the year before, and a projected 40-50% of mobile phones sold this year will be smart phones. It'll be very interesting to see how much competition Nexus One will give the iPhone, the rival it's clearly going after. Certainly, smart phone manufacturers have the youth market in mind (see this on a hybrid of the netbook and smartphone aimed at teens).