Google stopped selling its Nexus One phone through its online store last month but the device is not dead yet.

Google is now offering the Nexus One as an unlocked phone to developers for $530 so they can use it on any wireless carrier. To order the phone, users need to have an Android developer account, in which case they can just click on the "Development Phones" link from the account, says a blog post on the Android developer's blog.

The Nexus One will replace the T-Mobile HTC G1 as the official developer phone for Android. The Nexus One is certainly more expensive than the unlocked G1, which was priced at $400. But the Nexus One is also a device that despite its short life as a consumer product, still has among the best hardware in smartphones today.

Google launched the HTC-designed Nexus One in January on the T-Mobile network. But the phone was sold only online and not through T-Mobile retail locations.

Less than six months later, Google gave up on selling the device to consumers citing the poor response to the web store. Instead, it promised to bring the Nexus One into retail stores nationwide. So far, Google has yet to deliver on that. Google put the devices into retail stores of I wireless, a T-mobile affiliate, with about 250 stores mostly in the Midwest, but it hasn't announced any retail partnerships beyond that.

For now, the Nexus One remains alive and continues to trickle out of the Googleplex. The device for developers will ship with Android 2.1 and upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo on boot up.

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Photo: (Juliette Culver/Flickr)