The Google Phone Is Real [?]

According to TechCrunch, the Google Phone is very real and it is being developed right now at Google HQ. But this rumor is not without its complications and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington knows that. Which is why he proposes that the Google Phone won’t essentially be a phone, it will be something else.

Google is on the verge of completing its Google Voice project and rolling it out en mass. The taking down of GrandCentral’s website can be taken as a signal for this. GrandCentral is the original service behind Google Voice, which Google acquired. A more recent acquisition shows that they are very keen on making this service happen at once and in a big way too. They acquired a company called Gizmo5 that provides internet-based voice calling services. It is essentially a soft phone that Google badly needed in order to enable desktop users to make calls through Google Voice.

Google is tight lipped about the whole matter and even more so on the Google Phone. Google has explicitly said that making a phone would mean competing with their own partners. Of course, no one would want to do that in a business. So it is a very compelling argument. But according to the report, it is very real. So there’s only one viable way to bypass this argument — Google is not making a conventional phone but a phone that uses Google Voice as its only voice calling channel.

Think about it for a moment. You are using a phone that looks and behaves just like any other smartphone. You place a call and all it does is place the call through Google Voice instead of GSM or WCDMA. That would be nice. Or would it?

The only problem in such a scenario is the mobile data network on which a service like this would bank on. Mobile data networks are not very developed everywhere. It is far from being as ubiquitous as voice networks like GSM and CDMA. You do get GPRS in most regions and EDGE in many but placing VoIP calls over GPRS is nigh impossible and doing it over EDGE would mean a lot of frustration.

On the other hand, it does sit in with Google’s craving to move everything online. The more things they move online, the more user experience they can control and also the more revenue they can generate. Ultimately, they are likely to become the ultimate platform for user interaction, communication and computing online. That last bit will take place on the cloud, so you might be able to do 3D renders through machines the size of the CherryPal nettop – the first endeavour that really tried to push the cloud concept. But it was far too ahead of its time.

So why does Google even need a phone if its only going to be an MID? There is no one answer to this except citing Google’s need to cover every market that they possibly can. This is a common business strategy for big companies and it hardly gets bigger than Google right now. Big companies want universal presence. They want to be the first and last thing you see/use/think of every single day.

There’s also the opportunity to give better user experience and attract more customers. Upgrading to a better customer experience wherever there is opportunity, is something that Apple is very good at doing. But Apple tends to cherry pick its industries and control it with an iron fist while Google tries to exude an aura of openness. Wave is an open standard, so is the Android platform and now the Chrome OS. But Google also wants Apple like control over everything. After a certain higher-ranking Google office holder spent a lot of time at Apple, this can be seen as a side effect too!

The only way to get that control is to make everything your own — both software and hardware. That way, you get to decide how the users interact with your services. They are doing it with the Chrome OS and they will be doing it with this phone that they are developing. So look forward to a brand new era in mobile computing and communications come 2010, thanks to Google.

Read Related Posts

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5. Looks Like There May Be A Google Phone

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