Google Phone Rumors Solidifying 90
MrCrassic alerts us to an Ars Technica roundup of various reports about Google's rumored gPhone, from CrunchGear, Engadget, and others. Business Week attempts to read into the silence of software developers (who are all, presumably, under NDA) to triangulate Google's plans. Both outlets agree that Google is probably developing its own Linux-based OS for the gPhone, and that it will be open to outside developers.
Post references outdated/old articles (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Count me in! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1100 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Come on guys, stop and think (Score:5, Interesting)
They could put one in every student's and businessman's hands and still have market left over...
Re:Competition for the iPhone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Will I be able to use it without my data going through Google routers?
Re:consumer-level? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a problem with your Palm, your chat software, and/or your cellular provider. Persistent data connections are widely used on cell phones and don't drain batteries if implemented correctly.
Re:Competition for the iPhone? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just marketing. Here in Toronto the subway walls have been plastered with massive, blaring ads for Moto's RAZR 2. But none of my friends and colleagues want the phone. Omnipresent and expensive marketing can help a product sell, but it won't sell a product all by itself.
What DOES sell a phone? New shininess, and a slick UI that blows people away. Even just showing people my iPhone's keypad blows them away - the thing is intelligent enough to format your phone numbers into country code, area code, etc etc, as opposed to almost all other phones out there that simply display your number as a string of digits. Small elegances and conveniences go a long way into making your product more polished and wanted.
People are sick a tired of half-assed phone UIs, and while it works reasonably well that most people won't change, when presented with a cheaper alternative (which isn't the iPhone at the moment) they will jump ship in droves. I would hope for Nokia, Motorola, and Sony's sake that they've got better UIs in the labs right now.
Re:consumer-level? (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens is that the technology that Apple uses and it's customers are willing to pay for soon becomes cheap enough for commodity manufacturers to make and commodity computer makers to use. For most computer manufacturers, they will till any features it their computer that is cheap, rather than trying to design a useful machine. This is why so many computer have 4 in 1 readers but no firewire port. In any case, Apple does not say ahead of this curve, for instance they didn't seem to anticipate that every computer would have a high performance dedicated graphics processor, one Apple greatest advantages for a long time.
They seemed to have learned the lesson with iPod, and are updating it often to stay ahead of cheap imitators. So while MS will come out with gratuitous wireless, Apple pushes the hard disk capacity. Hopefully the same will happen with iPhone. The phone people are coming out with competitive phones, and the google software, with no license requirements, and ad support, might allow the phones to be significantly cheaper than iPhone. but likely will not have the full features of iPhone. In any case, the fact that a google phone is inherently intrusive will mean that the market will likely be limited to those that would not get an iPhone as they would not afford it, which is why they choose the ad supported option.
Really, if the iPhone faces a risk from google, it is because Apple made a decision not to be consumer friendly on this product. All the consumer hostile press that Apple has taken may convince some users that risk posed by the google phone is not significantly greater than the risk posed by apple.
Re:Competition for the iPhone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, there is one big reason why I think that in long term Google will do better (although I believe they take more risky approach). They have more open-minded business model. In mentioned GMail, they gave me everything I wanted. For free. I used their system as my spam filter. No revenue for them. But in the long term, that payed off (I use their web interface regularly now). They are not greedy in that short-sighted manner like Apple is. They seem feature friendly to the user.
Apple is old business done right. Google is new business (note that I did not say that this is necessarily "done right").