The Googlephone. It’s a concept that sometimes sounds an exciting taste of the future, and sometimes sounds like it’s already fizzled. And today, it’s back to being exciting: Google has announced that there will be a Sprint 4G version of its fine Nexus S phone–and that it will give consumers all the goodness of Google voice without making them switch their phone numbers. That’ll make it the first true native Google Voice phone.

The news would be noteworthy whenever it came down, but the timing is fascinating. It came down hours after AT&T agreed to acquire T-Mobile–there latter being the carrier that partnered with Google for the Nexus One and original Nexus S, and the only national carrier other than Sprint that counts as a scrappy underdog. Sprint needs good news; Google needs a wireless partner that isn’t T-Mobile and that doesn’t insist on acting like an 800-pound gorilla. Short of Google buying a phone carrier, there are all kinds of interesting things it could do with Sprint if the two companies agreed to let Google take the sort of dominant role that Apple took with the iPhone but which otherwise just doesn’t happen.

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Can you spot the catch with this $10 Nexus S over at eBay?

Wait, did Google just remove one of the Nexus S’s best features? And explain why killing it is good for users?

Time for another Last Gadget Standing face-off! On the surface, Google and Samsung’s Nexus S and Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor don’t have all that much in common—after all, one is a smartphone and one is a “reader’s tablet.” But they’re both based on the same operating system, Google’s Android, and that makes them distant cousins, at least.

I’ve reviewed and (mostly) enjoyed both of them–they’re both worthy Last Gadget Standing semi-finalists. Now it’s time for you to weigh in.

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Google Nexus S

Price: $529 (unlocked)

Hey, I forgot to mention: I reviewed Google and Samsung’s Nexus S smartphone for TIME.com. (Executive summary: best Android phone I’ve seen, nice hardware, the latest and greatest version of Android in uncontaminated form–but the OS still needs more polish.)

With the iPhone, you can be reasonably confident that there will be only one new model a year–and that the current model will be the best available iOS phone. (Of course, if the iPhone lands on Verizon soon, decisions will get trickier.) With Android, things move far more quickly–there are 172 available Android handsets so far (as of last week). And a whole bunch of handsets have had the honor of being the best single Android phone to date, usually for very brief periods. To me, the Nexus S is the current best single Android phone to date–but I’m not making any bets on how long it’ll hold the title.