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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
Andy's an old timer from the Bay Area BBS scene...I believe he used to run Spies on the Wire...he still has the domain as his personal page. www.spies.com. I believe I had an account there at one time or another. Glad to see he is still doing well.
Any old Spies members feel free to speak up...
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Magic Cap offered some interesting ideas but didn't offer a mobile phone--it produced a PDA OS. The General Magic company (mostly Apple employees spun off in an internal battle between Magic Cap and Newton) ended up licensing its technologies to Microsoft in 1998, which turned Windows CE from a laugh-out-loud joke into a mild embarrassment.
Microsoft didn't start shipping a phone product until 2002, the same year the Handspring Treo arrived (which combined the older Visor+phone back pack.) There were no real PDA phones in the 90s.
The Egregious Incompetence of Palm
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
Google is very unlikely to produce its own phone, and if it did, it would be nothing like Apple's iPhone, because Google is good at very different things. It has no experience in consumer hardware, retail, and couldn't even beat YouTube at serving videos.
The Great Google gPhone Myth
Google's phone is going to come with lesbians? Where do I sign up!??!
The Farewell Tour II
When reading continues flow of articles talking about iPhone that and gPhone this, I just get a feeling that what is the point? What's new? What's revolutionary? And when I think about it more, all I get it is pretty much nothing. The only explanation that I can find for this phenomenon is that as US lacks behind the rest of the world both in available cellular networks and phone models, and so anything new, even if it's been available for the rest of world for years, seems exciting. I can understand this from the consumers as they don't know any better, but why is the same true with the management of international corporations that should have a larger view on the matter?
I can understand that Apple wants to break into mobile phone businesses and deliver a phone with their touch. I can't understand why Google would ever want to do that. Google is concentrated on information and information deliverance business, they are not an hardware company. For Google it would be better to make an integrated Google mobile suite of applications, starting from blogging and imaging tools to email and calendars. Then they would work out a deal with leading smart phone vendors, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony-Ericsson, so that they would include the package with their phones including an Google icon in the main menu of a phone. This way Google, if they wanted it enough badly, they could make an world wide penetrations to mobile markets quick and effectively. Also if for some unknown reason, Google would really want an phone carrying their name, they could just re-brand a phone from one of their partners.
Of course this all with gPhone could be just a byzantine styled political battle with the telecoms where Google tries to intimidate telecom operators to open up more and develop their services and offerings. Thought bringing a new phone to the markets doesn't actually do this. The only way for Google to open up US mobile markets would be to make Congress and FCC open up the mobile networks for other companies and thus allowing virtual operators to enter the stage.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Mere phones (especially the conspicuous consumption dreck they're hocking these days) are past their usefulness.
A Google tricorder, now that's something I'd like to see. Scan e-mail for spam, scan the milk in the fridge to make sure it's not past expiration, an end to the puzzles of moderating on slashdot as the little gizmo beeps and says "-1, Borg".
Come on Google, another cellphone? Too many people expect their phones to be a damn orgasm. I don't want that. Give me a tricorder.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
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.
> It isn't that "you can't do anything" with the iPhone; it's that the iPhone doesn't enable you
> to do what you want on a "smartphone." The iPhone - like virtually all Apple products, from Mac
> OS X (and Macs) to the iPhone and iPod - is aimed at the average consumer, while attempting to
> hit enough high notes for the geeks to be satisfied. The Apple of late has been largely
> successful in this regard.
Reminds me of the last days of the "academic Internet". The phone companies were arguing that the anarchistic Internet where everybody could set up a service was fine for geeks, but that the average consumer would just be confused, and therefore were better off with the Phone Company's strictly controlled data network with Phone Company approved services.
The truth is that the Phone Company or in this case Apple, no matter how smart they believe they are, cannot duplicate the inventive power of a free market. That is why Apple lost the battle of the PC market to the plain IBM architecture (which they eventually adopted), and why the Phone Companies lost the battle of the data networks to the "academic and geeky" Internet.
Apple did win control of the music player market for now, but then again these devices doesn't need to do much beside playing music.
... but all ideology aside, Windows Mobile (while bloated) is actually a fantastic product, when it's configured right. In terms of business oriented features (and 3rd party development), it does actually make the iPhone weep.
Can Google make it so I can press my touch screen two or three times while tethered and be sharing a HSDPA link to my laptop via bluetooth or WiFi? Can they make it so I can debug my apps in an emulator or deploy them over USB for real device debugging in an IDE on my PC? Can they even promise I'll be able to run two apps at once?
We're talking first generation software from a company that doesn't really *do* commercial grade operating systems against a platform based upon an operating system that's well and truly hit it's stride now from a company who's used to developing them. Windows Mobile 6 is when MS finally got it right and I doubt Google will do that for a while yet. Hell, the iPhone has a brilliant interface, but systems wise it still isn't going to compete feature wise with Windows Mobile.
Free or not, there will be no suffocation - Windows Mobile is a tiny cost of a phone that is given away free or sold in monthly installments. In most countries, the phones are subsidized against a carrier contract anyway. It's not a market that Microsoft can be suffocated in.