The Google Phone?

VE3OGG writes "There has been ample hype over the last several years that Apple's iPhone was just around the corner. (Though a product named iPhone was just recently released by Cisco / Linksys.) Well, while Apple fans continue to salivate at the thought of a phone powered by the company-of-cool, the index-everything-while-doing-no-evil company may be setting itself up to produce their own Google phone in partnership with Orange."

Big Brother Google

[EtherealStrife]

So they know our credit card info, billing addresses, real names, etc from Google Checkout, they read our emails (Gmail), they know what we've been searching for (Google Search), they have access to our images (Picasa), access to our videos (Google Video), access to our IM habits (Google Talk), they track our movements (Google Earth), and now they want to monitor our telephone conversations? Next we'll be hearing that Cheney's been having secret meetings with Schmidt. . . . :P

All kidding aside, it's going to be interesting to see what Google eventually does with all this stored information.

Re:Big Brother Google

[garcia]

they track our movements (Google Earth), and now they want to monitor our telephone conversations?

They'd be tracking our movements via GPS/triangulation, calling habits (pizza/takeout?), and exactly what we're surfing (not just searching!) for. I'm sure the "monitoring of our telephone conversations" would be to display relevant ads on the screen after we regained Internet connectivity.

To answer your final question: they are going to use it to make more money.

Re:Since when is a corporation "cool"?

[Silver Sloth]

Since when is a corporation cool - since forever, that's when. It's called brand image. It is such a significant part of most purchasing decisions that companies will spend huge parts of their advertising budgets enhancing it. Indeed, most ads are selling a lifestyle aspiration, not functionality. i.e. 'drive a MyCarName because it's cool, not 'drive a MyCarName because it gets good gas milage'.

We /.ers are far too Intelligent to fall for this sort of thing and always make purchasing decisions based on rational argement. And if you'll believe that....

Re:Glad they're calling in the pros

[Sciros]

Well they're good ideas in any case. Something along the lines of a Nintendo DS screen would be ideal, as that is one of the better touch-sensitive screens out there as far as I know. Voice recognition software... well, Google ought to have the best out there given their vast amount of available training data for speech processing.

OMG a thought for the future (and yes Google is the closest to making this a reality): voice recognition matched with machine translation matched with sophisticated voice synthesis = complete language independence! Now *that* would be one heck of an advancement in communication. (yeah I know it's off-topic but I needed to write it down).

Re:If this is true...

[Billosaur]

But then again, I think they do like rumors getting out, at least ones that are false, as it keeps their competition guessing, and may get them to sink money into areas Google isn't going to compete with them in. Disinformation can be mighty useful in the corporate world.

An Industry Truism

[CantStopDancing]

People buy on emotion, and justify on fact.

Pre-purchase: "Drinking that beer will get me laid."
Post-purchase: "I like this beer because it has high alcohol content."

An ex-boss of mine used to tell me that even our (then-current) customers bought based on "how will this product help get me laid?" - and we weren't even selling a sexy product.

Re:Glad they're calling in the pros

[moresheth]

Another thing to note is that most websites aren't set up for mobile devices yet.

The good thing is that it can be done easily, and everything's in place for it to happen. It's one of the reasons that everyone gets excited about table-less designs. All it takes is a separate stylesheet to make your website formatted for a tiny iPod-sized screen.

Now all we need is for everyone to start making websites properly.

Re:If this is true...

[krakelohm]

True, but there is the downside of customers or potential customers getting excited about false rumors. Most of the time products that actually come to fruition are no match for the fantastic rumors that fly wildly. Apple has this problem quite a bit.

Re:We keep hearing rumors!

[iabervon]

They'll release it when they can get a cellphone chipset in quantity for less than their profit margin on iPods at the time (after the costs of their components have come down over the course of a product cycle). Then they decide that what they'll announce as the difference between iPod generations is that the new ones are incidentally unlocked GSM cell phones.

Alternatively, if they decide people want them enough, they do a generation where the storage difference between the $350 and $250 iPods is less, but the $350 one is a cell phone.

In any case, I bet that Apple will never release a device marketted as a cell phone, because people expect cell phones to be locked, and sold cheap by carriers, and Apple isn't going to want to play that game for a variety of reasons. Nobody's going to pay $350 for an Apple cell phone that plays music, but they'll buy a $350 iPod that makes phone calls, even though these are logically the same device at the same price.

Re:Glad they're calling in the pros

[RESPAWN]

Or we could all just get phones with built-in QWERTY keyboards. I've never been a huge fan of text recognition software -- my handwriting is so bad that I always had issues on my Palm. Now that I've bought a phone with a QWERTY keyboard, I rarely carry my PDA. It's a heck of a lot easier to type out a note to myself on the keyboard than it ever was to write it on my Palm PDA. It's also a heck of a lot easier to enter data on websites with a full keyboard. :)