Google Working on a Mobile Phone?

An anonymous reader writes "Are the boys from Mountain View planning a move into mobile hardware? silicon.com has been encouraging analysts to dissect rumours that the search giant has designs on building a mobile. It says 'If Google were to get into the device game, it would be more likely to concentrate on the wi-fi side of things — perhaps a single-mode VoIP phone optimised for Google services such as Gmail.'"

Comments

Pure Data Phone

[proc_tarry]

It's about time someone develops a pure data phone for GSM, and not sell it through one of the carriers. But instead sell it independently, and have the users get their own SIM through a carrier and sign up for a data only plan. Then have VoIP, or whatever, I'm not a techie, but someone could figure it out.

Why phones remain tethered to carriers is beyond me. They give away the phones so they can ream you with the monthly charge. I got pay-as-you-go via t-mobile & I pay much less, and without a contract, than a monthly plan.

Re:Pure Data Phone

[marcello_dl]

Think a single company having control on your email and phone conversation, your position and your internet browsing. I don't assert they're particularly evil (i use gmail too) but I don't feel comfortable anyway.

Why would Google do this?

[91degrees]

Google is a web service company. Branching out into electrnics makes no sense. I could imagine them banching into mobile services, and maybe even partnering with an exisiting company to make a specialised handset, but making a mobile phone? It doesn't mnake sense.

Re:Why would Google do this?

[altoz]

Contextual Ads, my man. Think about it, you're in some city and are walking to meet a friend (stored on google calendar, of course). The gPhone GPS gives you a contextual ad showing that there's a new cafe about 2 blocks away with exact directions on how to get there. There's also a new movie playing at the movie theater you guys are going to anyway, and of course, you can order the tickets direct without having to stand in line. And by the way, the restaurant near by also would like your attention. Maybe you can even pay for the meal with your google checkout account and receive a $10 discount. The possibilities are endless. The thing that a phone gives google is the ability to be where the user is at.

Organizing information is their thing. It's much more useful if the information is there at your fingertips.

Re:Why would Google do this?

[hey!]

Google is a web service company.

Is it? It wasn't so long ago, after all, that it was a search engine company.

One of the interesting things about Google is the options that its enormous technology assets give it. Google maps and Google mail are in a sense a side effect of Google's technological capability of handling massive amounts of data and requests for that data.

One mysterious thing they have been doing is buying/leasing lots of dark fiber. Dark fiber is capacity that was added when long distance cables were laid, because the marginal cost of adding capacity was negligible compared to the cost of running the cable. 97% of the fiber in the US is "dark".

Possibly a web services company might by some dark fiber to link its data centers together, but reports are that Google is investing as much as 1.25 billion dollars. That's a lot of dough to spend on something you don't have explicit plans to use.

Cringley thinks they are preparing for the time in the not too distant future that video brings the Internet to its knees, in which case they will step in and offer a solution -- for a price. Given the YouTube acquisition, it seems plausible that they're thinking in that direction.

But one thing that is clear is that while they are not a communications company like Sprint is today, they are at least keeping the option to do something that involves moving tons of data around. If they do, those companies already in the business aren't going to be happy. If they were preparing an entry into wireless services -- well, that's a market that's begging to be shook up. If you've ever used TCP/IP over a cell phone, and needed to call support, you'll know that wireless companies are really ambivalent about it. They don't want to become pushers of commodity bandwidth.

Maybe Google is contemplating an end run around the net neutrality debate. Wireless companies are the poster children for the evils of non-net-neutrality. If the move towards wireless skews the market toward the current wireless providers, the Internet will be balkanized into a bunch of minimally connected proprietary AOLs. This would be bad for Google, which mostly makes it money off of people accessing data held by third parties. On the theory that the best defense is a good offense, the best time to react to that is now when they have the cash.

Re:VOIP phone?

[Silverstrike]

I know you were being funny, but in all seriousness, its not an absurd idea.

Go back to 1950 and ask the IBM engineers if they thought that in 2007 we'd have terabyte storage systems on our desks with over 3 Ghz processors.

Remember, anything that you don't understand, is by default magic.