The google nexus mobile phone
Google is gearing up for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market that will include a new, Google-branded handset the Nexus One and the first comprehensive Google phone service with unlimited free calls.
For the first time, a single company will control everything from the software in users’ phones to the services they use to make calls and surf the web.
The Google Nexus One promises to be one of the most advanced smartphones, with a large touchscreen display and a processor almost twice as fast as the one powering Apple’s iPhone 3GS. It will probably be the first phone to run a new version of Google’s Android software.
The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Google Nex One to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile. International calls start from a couple of cents (just over a penny) a minute. Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging.
Google said the Nexus One represented the next frontier in the company’s $20bn (£12.4bn) core business – selling advertising through search.
If Google can succeed in linking its Google Voice service to Skype and other Voip networks, it can lure users with the offer of free long-distance calling and a “real” phone number.
One of Google’s challenges will be to link the phone to mobile networks so that the company’s services can be offered not just over wi-fi-connected broadband, but also over a 3G link to the internet, resulting in a real call-from-anywhere device.
This could prove a problem, though: few phone networks will appreciate being frozen out of lucrative business such as voice calling and text messaging, and being reduced to a simple data pipeline for Google’s services.
Google could also antagonise the networks by selling its mobile phone directly to customers and inviting them to use their existing Sim cards, whatever network they are on. Google wants the Nexus One not to be tied to particular mobile phone networks. The mobile networks aren’t the only enemies Google risks creating. Other phone makers now using the Android operating system, such as Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, might not take kindly to Google keeping the most up-to-date version of its software for itself. I predict that the Google Nexus One will be as successful as the iPhone, let’s see what happens in 2010.
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