As you all know, Google’s Nexus one was released Tuesday and as I read the review on Engadget, I noticed that there is only as 1g of memory. The only explanation for this that I can think of is that Android apps will at some point be essentially shells with the meat of the application living in the cloud. Of course this would only be possible if connectivity is virtually guaranteed. (This makes the M&A side of me feel like Google will buy Verizon.) By housing apps in the cloud, Google would have better metrics on usage and would then be able to “bleed into” Google’s web based OS, chrome.
The other (less likely) implication is that apps are not a part of their long term strategy. They may feel that Apple owns this model and there is no way to catch-up. Remember, Google is a web company and although apps can pull in data from the web; they are not the web. Curious to see what happens.