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Dvorak Says gPhone is Doomed

Posted by Zonk on from the that's-doom-ed dept.

drewmoney writes "Speaking with his usual frustrated crankiness John Dvorak rants his way through an article explaining why the gPhone will never work. 'First of all, it wants to put Google search on a phone. It wants to do this because it is obvious to the folks at Google that people need to do Web searches from their phone, so they can, uh, get directions to the restaurant? Of course, they can simply use the phone itself to call the restaurant and ask! I've actually used various phones with Web capability. They never work right. They take forever to navigate. It's hard to read the screens ... I also hope that people note the fact that the public has not been flocking to smartphones of any sort.' "

3 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Really? by rubink1 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

    --
    DGC
  2. Re:Really? by GnarlyDoug · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Absolutely. I'm not kidding. The guy is a genius at being wrong. I don't know why you got +5 Funny. It should have been +5 Insightful.

  3. Re:Bigger picture by DerekLyons · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    See this within the totality of what Google's trying to do. Right now, the American cell market is locked down by the providers, such that most phones are tied to a contract. Americans can't just buy a new phone and swap their SIM cards particularly easily. And even then, it wouldn't get much since all the providers suck anyway.

    And Google fixes this problem how? Once you get a gPhone, you are stuck with Google as your provider. (And I have little hopes for them not sucking - the gPhone network is so far outside of their core competencies that it's scary.)
     
     

    One could begin to see how Google might be on the verge of doing something very big. Google already has the content and useful applications for exploring the content. Now they need to be able to find better ways of getting that content to their users. Developing a phone, wireless capability, and backbone capacity would allow them to completely cut out the middleman.

    That's all very nice - but most people buy cellphones first and foremost to be... a phone. They don't buy it as mini-PC, and they don't buy it as a mini-PDA. Not to mention they are going into a fairly crowded field (cell phones) and within that field one entrenched provider (Blackberry) and one trendwhore provider (iPhone). Google's record at entering such fields is mixed at best.