Motorola to Add Google to Mobiles

Kijori writes "Motorola has announced plans to enable users of its mobile phones to access Google's internet search engine at the touch of a single handset button, the BBC is reporting. "The US mobile phone maker said it would introduce Google's software technology to many of its new handsets. The companies said they wanted to encourage more mobile users to access the internet using their phones." While mobile-phone internet use is currently low, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is optimistic: "People are going to spend all their time on it eventually," he said."

Google Mobile from within regular sites & Bitt

[turnstyle]

fwiw, you can also use Google Mobile from within regular pages -- you can see what I mean via my new Web-doodad, Bitty Browser [bitty.com].

How to make cellphone internet use take off

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simple, really, build bigger towers in smaller towns. My father lives 5 miles from one such town (1200 people) in Minnesota. He has no DSL, no cable, satellite works only when the dish is not covered in snow, and worst of all, even if he drove into town, he can get about two bars on an analog signal on his cellphone.

You want a natural monopoly? Move in, build a handful of tall digital towers, and cover the farmers and the townspeople in the digital age. Charge $50 a month just for access, add in some more for usage. Sell $400 bluetooth cellphones uncrippled so that they can connect real computers to the cellphone. Sure, some farmers might distrust those new fangled intarweb thingies, but many will get it, if only to keep their kids from getting bored and running off to the city and leaving the farm behind.

Not any time soon

[Dragoon412]

While mobile-phone internet use is currently low, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is optimistic: "People are going to spend all their time on it eventually," he said."

Not any time soon, they aren't.

With carriers charging obscene rates for data transfer (my plan with Cingular is $15/month extra for 5MB), charging by the kilobyte for overage, and the realistic speed you get off their gee-whiz-bang-super-ultra new networks delivering an experience similar to visiting a Flash-heavy site on a 9600 baud modem, and phones so absurdly underpowered (yet still overpriced) that they choke running a text-only browser, you'd have to be delusional to think mobile phone internet access will increase by any substantial amount in the near future.

Case in point: about a year ago, I got the much-hyped V3 Razr from Cingular. Remember the commercials? This thing was supposed to be a home entertainment center, PDA, and PC all in one device. Obviously I was skeptical, but I liked the form factor. And it's really hard to do much multimedia work with only 5MB of memory and no flash card capability.

Turns out, even in an area covered by what Cingular claims to be their hi-speed network, it takes me roughly a minute just to launch the browser and get my text-only home page loaded (it may have a Cingular logo on there, too, admitedly). Just the other day, I was sitting in the pharmacy, waiting on a perscription to be filled, and really wanted to know what time the Red Wings game started. It took ten fucking minutes to load a page only 3 clicks deep off my homepage and find out the start time.
 
...and this is on a supposedly high-end phone. Sure, if you buy one of those PDAs with a phone tacked on (i.e. the Treo), the experience is dramatically better, but the Razr is (sadly) still one of the better (best?) phones on the market, and if this is the dismal experience I'm getting now, how long until phones progress to the point that going online is tolerable and affordable for Joe User and the phone that came free with his plan? Quite a few years, I'd imagine.

It's sad, really. The biggest barrier to the adoption of mobile phone-based internet usage are the people trying to sell you the service in the first place. And the phone manufacturers aren't helping any. Cell phone providers suck the big one - who knew? ;)

Re:No they're not

[FireFury03]

Not at the current access rates they won't. I've used WAP once, and after getting my bill, I was through. Many people I know had the same experience with it.

Exactly - using GPRS means constantly watching the amount of bandwidth I use. Orange charge me something like 3ukp per month for a whole 4MB of bandwidth, and anything over 4MB gets charged at 10ukp per megabyte, it's crazy. I want pay as you go bandwidth charged at sane rates - the whole point of GPRS is that it's an "always on" thing but I can't even leave an XMPP client running on my phone because the keepalives alone eat up several hundred kilobytes per day.

Re:Not any time soon

[blork101]

I think that's Schmidt's point. Eventually, when the technology has been further developed, when we get the replacement to 3G that has obsene transfer rates, when companies like Google take an active role in the development of these phones (or at least the software). Google are just laying the foundations for another avenue of revenue for themselves.

Oh, and how long before this gets added to the Opera buying Google rumours? Remember, Opera's mobile browsing techology makes them a big target.

Party like it's 1999

[grumling]

Anyone have one of these keyboards? [salon.com] I know it must look like Google will be on top forever and ever, but anyone who used to use Alta Vista knows better (and anyone who knows about Alta Vista is an old man now). This phone is not going to make much of a difference in the long run.

Re:okay.

[carlislematthew]

I have a Treo 650 (which I hate) and get accused of "talking on a calculator" when I use it as a phone. I'm from England originally and when I took back my Treo to the UK for the "holidays" one year, my brother laughed really hard and said "what the fuck is that?". He of course pulled out his cool, small phone.

So we have this conflict. People want smaller, less obtrusive phones, and they want larger screens so they can do more on them! Ultimately, the maximum size of the screen is the phone itself, and there's the problem. I think PDAs for the most part are dying, and *nobody* (except the true ultra geek) wants to talk into one as a phone.

So the Internet gets richer (640 width isn't enough for most sites any more - 800 or 1024 is the norm), and phones get smaller. A new miniNet must be developed! And WAP can fuck off if it thinks it's part of that miniNet!

Re:Not any time soon

[cgenman]

Cingular is really bad about their data services.

I recently tried downloading a game to my phone to see what it was like. Note that this wasn't the internet proper, but was over their minimalist phone network. The game preview images took nearly 30 seconds to load, and the whole process took about 20 minutes. After I bought the game for 5 dollars, I went online to check my bill and found out that the process of finding and downloading the game took an additional 6 dollars worth of bandwidth. It's like buying 100 dollars worth of groceries and getting a 150 dollar "lingering fee" when you walk out of the building. Bandwidth just isn't that expensive.

I hear Verizon is a lot better with their data. Bandwidth is still tiny, but prices are closer to what you would expect to pay for a service like this.

Of course, I live in an area with three free open WAP points at any given location, so the whole thing is somewhat moot. But I won't buy a network-centric phone until the cellphone companies get off of their high horses and become network providers rather than end-to-end monopolists. After all, none of them have figured out yet that I want to SSH into a machine at work, so why should I expect them to be able to take responsibility for the entire experience chain?

It is my phone, I'll install what I want and run what I want. You can choose to provide the network connection or not. That's the way it works in the rest of the world, and man does it work better.

In developed Asia, the PC is dying.

[hullabalucination]

Kids and young adults in Japan and Korea are only interested in SMS and phone-oriented Web services rather than a PC:

http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1047257047.php [ojr.org]

In South Korea, meanwhile, the government has institutionalized the death of the personal computer in a program call the Post PC Era Initiative (formally, the "IT839 Strategy"):

http://www.hardware-depot-online.com/xybernaut_est ablishes_korean_operations_to_benefit_from_post_pc _era_db.jspx [hardware-d...online.com]

You can scoff and say that "well, that's fine for the Asians, but it will never catch on here." I said the same thing 20 years ago when I saw my first Japanese anime and manga stuff. "Nah...this stuff is too tied in to a completely foreign culture and lifestyle and is too out-of-context for kids in the West to relate to. Never catch on here." Now I have a 24-hour anime channel on cable--in rural Texas. Proving once again (as has been proven countless times over the past 40 years if I had been paying attention) that whatever it is that the Japanese youth are doing now, we in the U.S. will be doing in another decade.