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."

Comments

Does this mean all my calls will be archived?

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

or is that already being done by the NSA?

Re:Does this mean all my calls will be archived?

[User 956]

Does this mean all my calls will be archived? or is that already being done by the NSA?

No, the NSA doesn't do that, your calls are being monitored and archived by a dif@#*(@#&$@#($&*NO CARRIER*

okay.

[User 956]

The companies said they wanted to encourage more mobile users to access the internet using their phones."

Well, they could do that by offering screens with an acceptable resolution for browsing the internet. Even the *brand new* Treo 700w only has a 240x240 screen. WTF?

Re:okay.

[User 956]

I personally wouldn't want to carry a huge screen around...

It doesn't have to be "huge". A 400x400 screen would be more than fine. The treo 650 has a 320x320 screen.

So the 240x240 in a newer model is especially bizarre. Isn't technology supposed to advance, not regress?

Re:okay.

[carlislematthew]

Perhaps we should have a 3" LCD with 1024x1024 resolution? At a certain point, those pixels are going to get tiny and useless. Most people don't like small fonts and difficult to read text. My mother-in-law runs a 17inch monitor at 800x600. It kills me when I see it...

Re:okay.

[timeOday]

The VGA (640x480, or actually 480x640) screens on PocketPCs look great. They're too wide for a phone, but a 640x240 screen, held in landscape mode, would work great on a phone in combination with a scroll wheel. From my own experience browsing on various Palm and PocketPC devices, the main thing to allow normal rendering is adequate width.

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:okay.

[carlislematthew]

Earpieces are a pain (admit it) and almost as bad as putting a calculator to your ear... I've tried bluetooth headsets and they're OK, as long as you remember to charge the damn thing!

I'm coming from a situation where I've had all the gadgets, and have got fed up of having an oversize and unreliable phone. I'm also fed up of charging all these damn gadgets all the time. I'm ditching the bluetooth headsets, ditching the huge phone/pda/unreliable-piece-o-crap and going back to as basic a phone as I can find!

No they're not

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Babies can use google too!

[kid-noodle]

Mobile Phone - Cellular Phone.

Cellular Phone is AFAIK, largely a US thing - we've called them mobile phones (because they're mobile, and they're phones), in the UK for donkey's years now.

Re:Babies can use google too!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

This is a mobile. I hate that use of the word, "cell phone" worked just fine, IMO.

This is a cell. I hate that use of the word, "mobile phone" worked just fine, IMO.

Get off your high horse already, and realize English is a living, changing language. This isn't France for crying out loud...

been doing that for a while

[chrismtb]

I have been accessing google and other wap sites for a long time, including my school email, gmail, weather, mapquest, yahoo and more. With verizon, WAP / wireless web only uses minutes (free on nights/weekends), as long as you use your own proxy server (or a free one). What you pay verizon $5/month for is use of their proxy server. Note that there are exceptions to this: some of the newest phones require a data plan and wireless web may not be charged as minutes.

I run my own proxy server on my PC and log on to that with my phone. I set up a free WAP homepage, with links to a bunch of useful sites. If you set up or find a reliable proxy server, it is just a matter of doing some very basic on-phone "hacking", which usually just consists of accessing hidden menus. More information than you would ever need about phone hacking is available at Howard Forums. Mail2Web is a site that lets you check virtually any email through WAP.

Noob note: if you are going to run your own proxy, make sure to password it, especially if you are on a network. Slashdot may not let you post if you are running a proxy.

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: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.

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.

Re:Not any time soon

[macpeep]

Perhaps not in the USA. But the USA isn't the only country in the world, and in particular when it comes to mobile services, it's definitely not representable of the rest of the world. In Asia and in Europe (I live in Finland) people use the Internet a lot - directly and indirectly. Directly in the obvious ways; web, email, download of games, etc. And indirectly by using various applications that access the Internet - for example online multiplayer games, news readers (like the Finnish "Kanavat" application that downloads compact web-like content from various media sources and allows these to be read offline and/or with zero-wait between page switches).

The prices are obviously not as cheap as they could and should be, and crazy expensive relative to home broadband Internet. But in absolute terms, it's not that bad. I pay 18 euros a month for 100 MB of data traffic. 100 MB is a huge amount to download over a cellphone link (with EDGE or 3G UMTS, the real-world speed is at best somewhere above 200Kbps). I typically read the news from a couple of websites each morning on the subway, and that results in total data downloads of maybe 50 megs per month. 18 euros for that is around 50 cents per day for this pleasure. Like I said, in absolute amounts, that's really not so bad!

Rumor has it that flat-rate fees for unlimited traffic are coming (to FInland) in 2006 and the prices will be around 20 euros a month.

Peppe

google stories on slashdot?

[DarkClown]

what is the record for the most google stories at the same time off the slashdot homepage?
right now there are 3...
wonder what the record is for any single topic having the most slash-share at a given time...

Ballmers new (broken) mobile

[nighty5]

(Throws the mobile across the room)

I'm gunna fuck'n kill Motorola
Steve Ballmer

Why would I want to use Internet on mobiles?

[Xugumad]

"People are going to spend all their time on it eventually,"

My experiences with Internet on mobiles so far has been that it's slow, expensive and awkward to use. If you spend a lot of time on buses or trains I suppose I can understand a desire for mobile Internet access, although using a laptop and data card would seem a much better solution anyway. The only time, ever, that I didn't have easy Internet access, and it was an issue, was a sys-admining problem that I'd have needed ssh to fix, anyway (and the idea of doing sys-admin work on a mobile screen with the standard keypad gives me nightmares).

Anyone, why would I want this?

Party like it's 1999

[grumling]

Anyone have one of these keyboards? 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.

In other news...

[cgenman]

Google has Googled the entire Googley Google. Google Google world park in Googleville has a Googleplex of Googish Googles Googling to Google your Googles. "We Google Your Google so you don't have to," said one Googliscious Googler.

A spokesperson for MSN was Googled as saying: "Crap"

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

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

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.

Bill

[michelcultivo]

Wait the first bill and you will see if you need it anymore.