The Fast Rise and Fall of the Nexus One, the Tragic "GooglePhone"

The history of the Google Nexus One is a lesson in hype, in marketing, and how one mistake can doom an otherwise solid phone. The news prompting this retrospection? Sprint has announced that it will not sell the troubled handset, dooming it to a life on perennial fourth-place network T-Mobile (and AT&T, sort of). But what happened? Wasn't the "GooglePhone" supposed to dethrone the iPhone and change the way we buy smartphones?

Rumors of the mythical GooglePhone have been around for years. The...