Google Attack On the Mobile Market Rumored

xchg writes in with a somewhat speculative, though plausible, piece from WiseAndroid claiming that Google is gearing up for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market that will include a new, Google-branded handset and the first comprehensive Google phone service with unlimited free calls. "The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Googlephone to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile. International calls start from... just over a penny a minute. Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging. Google sounded its intentions two weeks ago when it purchased a small company called Gizmo5... [E]xperts are predicting that the Googlephone will be launched in the US early next year."

Comments

Creative destruction

[mruizcamauer]

... of a large industry, telecoms... but that is progress!

Re:Creative destruction

[sakdoctor]

I hate mobile phones and everything about the industry behind them.
This sounds quite a bit less hate-able.

Re:Creative destruction

[Shakrai]

What industry abuses their customers, dangles features and incentives of questionable value in a quid pro quo for contractual lock-in and then produces unilateral unpredictable billing and surcharges to this captive market? No. You are right! That describes Credit Card companies, the only business hated more by their customer base than the mobile phone providers.

What credit card company uses 'contractual lock-in'? I've never seen a credit card that you couldn't cancel at any time.

Re:Creative destruction

[MBCook]

Wait... you mean to get out of a loan with a bank (basically what a credit card is)... I have to pay it off?!?

Dear god, they're screwing us!

Re:Creative destruction

[MBCook]

They don't get to add $500 "you paid off your card" fees. What amount are you talking about?

The high interest rates? You agreed to them in the contract. It was a one sided contract, but you agreed. You can pay off your loan at any time and get out of it.

Should credit cards be able to lend people $25k at 28% interest? Almost certainly not. Does that mean it's OK to take that money and then claim "it was unfair, I demand 7%"? No.

Re:Creative destruction

[Flavio]

Here's the deal: be realistic. No company's going to offer you a "fully open" cell phone simply because there aren't any fully open operating systems for smart phones out there, and rushing something similar to the market would end up in a support nightmare. Nokia's come a long way with Maemo running on the N900, but the user impressions I've read wrt to the N900 make it clear that the software is beta at best, and is lacking features one would consider standard in a smartphone.

Here's my unsolicited advice: buy an unlocked GSM phone from overseas. My GSM Nokia 5800 can sync over USB or bluetooth, connect me to the Internet over bluetooth using Nokia's Ovi Suite (for Windows) and comes with all the cables you'll need, including the car charger. It's a very affordable smartphone, has great GPS functionality which doesn't require an internet connection to download maps, can play high resolution videos, has a real (albeit kind of slow) web browser and is made by Nokia, which is the most OSS-friendly cell phone manufacturer out there.

Re:Creative destruction

[Shakrai]

Did you know that when you do that, the credit card company reports it as negative credit information that lowers your credit score?

-1, factually incorrect. They do no such thing. Reporting 'negative' information that isn't true would be a violation of the fair credit reporting act. Paying off your credit card will not lower your score. It can only raise your score, as one of the key factors of your credit score is the amount of debt you owe vs. your total credit limits. Ideally this value should be less than 15%, though it doesn't really start to hurt you until you exceed 40%.

Closing an account may hurt your score, as the score model prefers older accounts to newer ones. But that really doesn't have anything to do with paying off your debt. If you pay off your debt and keep the account open your score can only go up. Whether or not it goes down if you close the account depends on a number of different factors -- how much debt you owe on your other accounts, how old they are, how old the closed one was, etc.

In any case, the credit scores weren't designed by the credit card companies. They were designed by the credit reporting agencies and a company called Fair Issac. None of them happen to be in the credit card business.

A "deadbeat".

Who cares what they call you? I pay off all my accounts in full, every month. I don't care if they think I'm a deadbeat. I'm still getting an interest free loan for 25 to 60 days. I'm also getting liquidity -- I can make a purchase without regard to when my next paycheck happens to be.

The credit card companies are at the top of the list of commercial entities that are openly hostile to their customers

You are painting with a really broad brush there. I had a WaMu account for five years until they went out of business. They were one of the nicest companies I've ever done business with. My credit union offers credit cards with a fixed 7.9% APR and a single page account agreement that doesn't require a law degree to decipher.

As with any business, there are good actors and there are not-so-good actors. It's up to you to give your business to the ones that treat you decently. I have no sympathy for someone who is doing business with a "hostile" credit card company when there are so many alternatives that are only a phone call away. You might find this hard to believe but Citi, Chase and Capital One don't have a monopoly on the credit card market. There are alternatives.

Re:Google Is the New Borg

[WindBourne]

How are they monopolists of information? In fact, have you seen them ILLEGALLY enforce their natural monopoly? Have you seen them do illegal actions to take over markets? If so, please provide the proof of that. Otherwise, Cayate la boca, chica.

Adapt or else

[gmuslera]

Remember when web mail providers were giving like 4Mb of mailbox capacity, and then Google came with 2Gb (oh, yes, and a spam filter that actually worked)? Most providers didnt vanished, just had to adapt and still are here, giving a better service to their costumer. For cellphone industry that is something very needed, someone that come with a disruptive idea and weight enough behind to actually push it. Wont kill all companies, but to survive they will have to improve, not just giving the latest gizmo and charging you a lot.

The article may say something incorrect

[Myopic]

The article says

For the first time, a single company will control everything from the software in users’ phones to the services they use to make calls and surf the web.

But wait, every phone I've ever had the hardware, software, and services were controlled 100% by my phone carrier. So in that way, the Google phone would be the same.

To me, the difference is that I trust the hardware, software, and services from Google, but I don't for a second trust AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. They have proven that they refuse to provide products and services that I want, but Google has proven that they very much understand and want to provide the products and services that I want. I share the privacy concerns about Google, but at this point I'm just being vigilant, watching for Google to violate my trust. So far so good.

Google! Please put the dinosaurs out of business! I want to stop giving them my money! I want to give you my money for better services!