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The Man Behind the Google Phone
Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times is running a story about Andy Rubin, Google's resident gadget guru, and one of the primary architects of the gPhone. You won't find any new technical details about the gPhone in the story, (Google is planning an announcement on Monday about its future mobile plans.) but the story about Rubin gives some clues that indicate that Google plans to do more than merely develop an operating system for cellular phones. One clue to the gPhone is that after Rubin left Apple he joined General Magic, the company co-founded with Mac pioneers Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld that developed Magic Cap in the 1990s, a PDA precursor years ahead of its time that included a cell phone and email. The Times speculates that Google may also be planning to replay the strategy that Microsoft used to bulldoze Netscape in the mid-1990s by 'cutting off' Microsoft's air supply by giving the gPhone away to handset makers and to put Microsoft Windows Mobile out of business. If the strategy works, it will be because Rubin and his team have successfully developed a vision of the smartphone of the future and a strategy for getting it accepted by the public and by the carriers."
I sincerely hope they don't confuse "clean interface" with "bare bones". Google's interface is good for what we use it for, but I kinda like the bling on modern cellphones. Cue the "I just want a cell phone that..."-people in 3, 2, 1...
+Raider of the lost BBS
I'm a techie just like anyone else, but phones have gotten out of control.
Specially coming from the pre-tiger platform philosophy, I believe objects and apps should be designed to perform one function and perform it well.
Most phone designers have become so preoccupied with trying to turn good phones into crappy laptops they forgot to actually make them usable as phones
I held onto an old brick from 2001 until it broke in late 2006 because it did only two things: it called people, and it stored numbers in a list which could be both accessed and browsed using a single button. This allowed me to get things done instantly even when heavily preoccupied or even in places where the screen could not be accessed.
The contrast can't be any greater between that trusty old brick and your modern bloated phone. The simplest means to access that same contact list now requires delicately tiptoeing around unusably small buttons (built for form over function) and digging through 3 menus ostensibly designed the same way banners and popup ads are, to trick you into unintentionally selecting "extras" which will show up on your bill.
Whereas it was feasible to use the old brick to, say, safely check up on or get corrections for driving directions in transit, the requirement on new phones to dedicate constant attention to the screen to make sure you're making the proper selection from their cluttered menus means the phone is no longer "mobile", it's a "roadside" or "parking lot" phone.
Heck even the color screen is arguably form over function. Black and white lcd's can be accessed in full sun without any required input for basic information such as time and date, while color screens can at times be unreadable and often require you to remove the key guard to view relevant information.
I carry a macbook with me, I don't need a portable tv, or a portable wifi browser, or a portable aim client, or a pack of dancing girls to fly out, or my own personal butler-in-a-box. I want an utterly bare bones phone that's small enough to be unintrusive but large enough to be usable. Nobody, not even apple, produces this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
WM users are primarly Exchange (Enterprise) users, and they are not going to use gphone, or anything linux. For your statistical geeks there are more in the work force using WM than there are linux users in total.
"... cut off their oxygen like Microsoft did to Netscape.."
That's just not going to happen. MS managed to kill Netscape because the browser they suffocated was most of Netscape's business. Windows Mobile is only a tiny part of MS, and if Google tries to suffocate WM they may well succeed, but MS won't thrash around and die. If you want to kill all of MS, you have to suffocate Microsoft Office (at least, maybe Exchange and SQL Server too).
If Google tries to use their piles of cash from other parts of their business (advertising) to suffocate Windows Mobile, Microsoft will simply use piles of cash from other parts of their business (MS Office & friends) to support Windows Mobile.
Google could offer an all-encompassing Google-software-pack for Symbian and Windows Mobile to direct a lot of mobile traffic to them in a lot of the world (maybe not the US where handsets are too locked down, but the US is not most of the mobile world) without having to fight WM or have their own hardware.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
In any case, I don't believe that ths sole fact of being free (as is beer) will be enought to motivate handset maker to jump into it, mostly when there are other initiatives for linux based mobile devices including phones.
I'm sorry but from a developer's perspective the fact that I can create an application on the PC (.NET) and also run it on a Windows Mobile device without modification, means the Microsoft's mobile solution is not going away anytime soon. That statement in the article summary is cursory. Google is going to need something deeper than web-based APIs to unroot developers. Even the iPhone hackers want something deeper than some tom-foolery promoted by Apple, supposedly coming in the new year.
The "free" phone market was stuck in UI limbo, with consumers buying primitive phones because there was no alternative. The free market is a great thing, but unless you have a good variety of companies competing within it it's not a useful mechanism for progress. Apple competing in the market is a _very_ good thing for consumers, software SDK or not, as we'll all soon see through competing products.
Apple does have a tendency to be authoritarian, but it's not as bad as people usually say. It's more that the company's focus is on the average user, and that until they can find a way to have both usability and extensibility in their products, usability wins out. The SDK is coming, and the fact is they're going to have the SDK out there before anyone else has any serious competitors to the iPhone, so it's not like the free market is out-pacing Apple.
I'm totally in favour of being critical of Apple, and any other company, when they deserve it - but in this case you're just asking for too much too fast, and Apple isn't going to do that if they have to sacrifice quality.