Google’s Nexus S coming next week to a Best Buy near you

Google has announced that the Nexus S will be appearing in a Best Buy near you as early as next week.  The AT&T compatible device will be available for $99 with a two year contract and comes seven months after it launched on the T-Mobile network.  You can go to Best Buy, or their website, and pre-order the phone as early as today.  The Nexus S is a smartphone manufactured by Samsung for Google.  Samsung has launched a bunch of phones since December, but none of them have been as popular as the Nexus S.

The new phone will come with Android 2.3 and can be upgraded when the newest version arrives.  The Nexus S was available through AT&T for some time now, but Best Buy has picked it up and dropped the price to just $100 with the contract.  The white version was imported for AT&T and costs $469.99 while the T-Mobile version was selling for $349.99 on Amazon.com.  If you are looking at an unsubsidized version of the phone, you can expect to pay $530 to $700!  The $99 price from Best Buy matches that of the T-Mobile and Sprint versions.

This release is happening a little before the new iPhone coming soon and the Samsung Galaxy S II, so it will have a tough time selling faster than those two models.  Google did offer the Nexus One for AT&T, but that was not for sale very long and the price was not subsidized and didn’t sell as well.  If you do not remember the specs for the Nexus, here is a quick list.

The Nexus S comes with a 4-inch display, the 1GHz “Hummingbird” processor from Samsung, 16GB of space with 1GB going to applications, weighs only 129 grams and has all the wireless standards.  The phone also comes with a 5MP camera facing the back with LED flash.  The front facing camera can record video in 720p at 30 frames per second.  The phone also comes with NFC support.  The battery life, reported to be less than iPhone, is claimed to be almost 7 hours.

All of the Google applications and Google Voice are available for the phone.  Apps like Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Talk are all included on the phone and of course, you have access to the 250,000+ apps from the Android Marketplace.