Not a fail - they accomplished quite a bit.
For a while they had one of the top phones in the market.
They sold quite a few of these phones through their online stores. It just turns out that people feel more comfortable with a phone if they can actually hold the thing in their hands. Also, they did no offline advertisements, and just a few text links on their homepage and elsewhere.
Being locked to one single plan with T-Mobile kept me from buying the phone. If I could have bought it with a family plan I'd have had an N1 for months now!
edit: hi fuze
