Best Buy offers Google Nexus S Android smartphone for free

Anyone looking for a new phone or looking to upgrade their current smartphone might want to take a trip to the local Best Buy or log on to BestBuy.com, and you might want to do it fast.

The electronics mega-store has teamed up with Google to offer the Google Nexus S smartphone for free, today and today only, starting at 9 p.m. PST last night and ending at 9:59 p.m. PST tonight.

Pending the signing of a new two-year activation agreement, customers can walk out of the store with a “pure Google experience” phone without paying a dime, and the phone is valid on all carriers who support the device: AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

The Nexus S, co-developed by Google and Samsung, first became available in December of 2010 and is Google’s second effort at putting a product out on the smartphone market.  Their first attempt came back in January 2010 when they introduced the HTC Nexus One.

The Nexus S sports some impressive specs including a 1 GHz Cortex processor, 16 GB of internal memory, portable Wi-Fi hotspot, a four-inch contour display screen, a front and rear five mega-pixel camera and all the latest Google mobile applications including Google Earth and Google Maps with navigation.

Another great feature of the Google phone is its Android 2.3 Gingerbread software, which is the fastest version of Android currently available on any smartphone.

It also offers near field communication (NFC) capability, which, when paired with the Android app Google Wallet, essentially gives the phone the ability to turn into a credit card for checkout use.

Though the smartphone is essentially the same across all three phone-service providers, one critical point of difference is the fact that only the Sprint version offers 4G capabilities while AT&T and T-Mobile each offer a version of the Nexus S that runs on the 3G network.

The other main distinction is that on any other day, the Sprint version of the Nexus S will cost $99.99 while the AT&T and T-Mobile models go for $199.99.

But those prices are for any other day.  Until 10 p.m. tonight their price tags all read the same: a cool $0.

With the opportunity for customers to leave Best Buy with what some reviews have called one of the best phones on the market, who can argue with a deal like that?

Just don’t forget to pay when that first bill of the new two-year contract comes in the mail.