I have just received confirmation that I’ll be receiving a Nexus One. All developers with a rating of 3.5 stars or higher and more than 5,000 unique downloads will be receiving either a Droid or a Nexus One.

In my opinion, 5,000 downloads is actually quite low. I have three apps at the moment totalling over 120,000 downloads. I think Google is giving phones out to developers to encourage earlier developers to test their older apps on newer devices as well as encourage more apps to be written.

Purchasing the latest phones is an issue for developers. It can be costly ensuring an app runs on all phone variants. In my 14 year mobile career I can only remember having received (as a developer) an iPAQ from Redmond and very recently a Satio from Sony Ericsson.

Conversely, as a blogger I have received many more phones. Phone OEMs and network operators have been far more interested in getting the word out on new phones than ensuring that applications continue to work/continue to be developed. As usual, Google is taking an engineering rather than marketing driven approach. Seed developers with phones and see what happens.