The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon | Hacker News Reader

The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon

techcrunch.com

59 pointssnewe36 comments

One possibility is that Google is thinking really outside the box.

They have Google Voice and have recently purchased Gizmo5. In addition they have been really working towards providing free Wifi access in various hotspots and have been fighting for wireless spectrum.

It may be wishful thinking, especially since I'm not a wireless phone technology expert, but can Google be setting the stage for a pure VOIP Wifi phone which completely bypasses Telcos and can this Google phone be just that?

In my dreams, yes, but you're going to have serious problems with that implementation. Think about your cell phone in your car on a plane, etc.

In the UK 3* already have a dedicated Skype-over-Wifi handset, I believe it wasn't terribly successful.

*3 is the name of a mobile telco in the UK.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. On one hand we have Mike Arrington who is wrong quite a bit. On the other we have the VP of Android Engineering directly stating that Google isn't making a device and won't compete with their customers. If I were a betting man I'd say Mike's going to eat it.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10387677-265.html

My personal guess is that Arrington's source heard about a real project, but it's actually just another Android Developer Phone, not a consumer product.

The tone is so sensationalist!

As I said last time these rumors came up, I really don't think this story is accurate.

Nobody in the US wants to buy a $500+ phone at retail when they can buy a $150 Droid or a $50 G1 with a new plan. After all, you're going to have to pay the same monthly fee either way.

Not to mention the fact that it's basically impossible to have one phone that will get 3G on all US carriers (even supporting just two at once would be difficult and expensive). If it only works on one carrier, how is it any different from the Droid?

Nobody in the US wants to buy a $500+ phone at retail when they can buy a $150 Droid or a $50 G1 with a new plan. After all, you're going to have to pay the same monthly fee either way.

t-mobile would disagree with you. they just announced new plans a few weeks ago that are contract-free, cost less per month (since you are not paying for the subsidized cost of a phone), and allow you to bring your own phone or buy theirs for the total upfront cost.

i am using an iphone on t-mobile and just switched to one of these plans. i got locked into a 1-year contact by buying the mytouch 3g when it came out, but once the contract is up, i'll be contract-free and paying less per month than i would on their normal plan.

t-mobile, while trying that...i wouldn't say would disagree with you. at this point they are just throwing everything against the wall, hoping something works. They're desperate. They are losing customers, and their (ARPU) average revenue per user (the most important metric in the wireless industry) is dropping.

What do you gain by paying more upfront for a phone that you can't really take anywhere else anyway? Sure, your iPhone will work on T-Mobile... but not with 3G.

you are paying the same amount for the phone regardless. you're either paying for it all upfront or spreading it out by paying an extra $10 every month for the duration of the contract.

with the new plans, you can buy their phone upfront and then sell it on ebay/craigslist and move to another provider without worrying about breaking a contract, or you can just bring your own phone.

My unscientific prediction: Andoid has only a few months to catch up to iPhone by June 2010, when the exclusivity deal with AT&T ends. This is not nearly enough.

I think the Droid will help quite a bit, provided Apple doesn't have much up their sleeve to announce in June.

I disagree. There is no deadline, especially not in a market where people purchase new phones every 18-24 months.

I can see Android's sales continuing to trickle upward as prices drop on phone hardware, as companies use their brand loyalty to push Android phones on those upgrading, as new manufacturers enter the fray, and as the public are clearer about what 'Android' is.

I think people expected too much from Android on day one. Android's only been a multi-manufacturer platform for about 3 months and before then were only two rather clunky handsets which were both basically rush-released. It was never going to have the immediate impact that the iPhone had due to it being later to market, not having sales of the iPod to drive it forward, having less brand recongition and less marketing behind it. The nature of the beast is that it was always going to be a slow burner.

A T and T is not really a concern in most of the world, so at best that concerns the US market, which has been, until the iPhone, a bit of a backwater in terms of mobile phone stuff.

I see Apple conquering a nice share of the market, maybe even larger than anyone else, but still well under 50%. If everyone has one, they lose their cachet. Also, Android will probably never be quite as beautiful, but if you combine 'good enough' with a far more open system, and a platform that people can innovate on, I think that, long term, it will do quite well.

I sure hope so; I'm simply not interested in owning devices that I can't load my own code on, and that also require the ownership of a Mac just to develop on.

I'm simply not interested in owning devices that I can't load my own code on

The average consumer doesn't care about this.

Good for them, I was talking about myself in that phrase, which is why I prefaced it with "I sure hope so".

I do think that open tends to win out over closed, though, with time, because the advantages for developers and businesses translate into advantages for everyone.

I agree that advantages for developers and businesses are key to success in the long term, for any platform.

But I don't agree that openness of the platform is necessarily the exclusive nor primary way of doing that — it's just a way of doing that.

Right now, Apple's platform is clearly offering key advantages to developers and businesses, in spite of not offering a very open platform.

Personally, I hope both Google, RIM and Palm manage to catch up in this department. Strong competition between these vendors should offer plenty of incentives for them to improve their own platforms.

Apple certainly seem to need a bit of extra motivation to improve the train-wreck that is the AppStore approval process — right now I think their success is blinding their ability to see many of their flaws.

> Right now, Apple's platform is clearly offering key advantages to developers and businesses, in spite of not offering a very open platform.

It absolutely blew the competition out of the water, so yeah, that's what the 'key advantages' are. Everyone had been muddling along with their fiddly Nokia interfaces, which aren't bad, but nowhere near as nice or cool as the iPhone.

However, Android looks to be 'good enough' in terms of competition, much like Windows was 'good enough' when competing with the Mac, and much more open in terms of what it ran on. The big open question for me about Android is fragmentation. With j2me staring them in the face, it's something they have to be thinking about a great deal, and I'd really love to know what they actually think about it.

In any case, between a closed, proprietary platform and an open source one, I know where my own loyalties lie. There is tons of work in this field, and I will simply not bother with mobile if it ends up being 'owned' by Apple.

I'm not talking about the interface of the device, I'm talking about the complete picture of developing mobile apps — Apple's offering, while flawed, is a huge step up from the state of mobile development prior to the iPhone.

I think that:

* The app store is a good idea and a win for developers.

* The tools/environment suck. I don't use a Mac and I do not want to. Java ME lets me use Linux, Mac or Windows. Same with Android.

* The hoop jumping sucks. Reading about all the hoops just to get something on your own phone makes it look unpleasant.

* The single platform does make things easier, but that has some costs for consumers who don't get as much freedom as with, say, Nokia (who have way too many offerings, but that's another post, another time).

So, they've had a few good ideas, but on the whole I don't think it's revolutionary. I think the hardware/software themselves are what was really the great leap forward.

If their offering to mobile app developers isn't revolutionary, why is the number and quality of apps revolutionary?

They've been preparing ways of dealing with fragmentation since day one: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/resource...

until the iPhone, a bit of a backwater in terms of mobile phone stuff.

That isn't true. Rather it is the case that BlackBerry has had very little visibility to consumers until recently. For example, BBs have had a multitasking OS for a long time now, whereas Palm are touting it as a great innovation.

Also you can run your own Java code on them...

BB's are nice, but they're sort of a niche product in some ways, and what I really meant was that the whole... "ecosystem", if you'll pardon the buzzword, was just not as advanced in the US. I think that's starting to catch up, in part because of the iPhone.

Where's Apple going to go? T-Mobile? They have even less 3G coverage than AT&T. They could go to major effort and redesign the radio to be able to get on Verizon or Sprint, but considering every other worldwide market they target is GSM I don't really see that happening (other than a few prototypes to light a fire under AT&T).

Why would the cost of making a Verizon/Sprint compatible phone outweigh the profit from those customers? What would the cost be to make a phone with both radios?

I just really can't imagine Apple not wanting to be available to the most consumers possible if the costs are low enough.

Edit: also I just found this, so at the very least, it does look like there would be chips available to support this - http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/06/iphone.may.hav...

Splitting the product line in two is a significant cost (besides engineering, you need to do QA, licensing, support, manufacturing etc). It's not as simple as switching out the chips, mobile phones are very complicated and smartphone in particular are exceedingly so. Engineering is in a constant battle with design to come up with something that works, even something as simple as finishes/paint cause great differences in reception and need to be customized for the radio and radio placement.

I'm sure they'd do it if they thought it would be profitable, but they'd also be giving up the exclusivity money from AT&T which has to factor into it.

> There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

Excuse me, but how exactly will releasing another Android phone reduce splintering of the platform? That doesn't make sense at all.

It could become the defacto standard for Android devices. Mostly screen resolution & a baseline CPU/memory expectation for developers to target. This could reduce splintering by simply making Android a far less attractive option for use outside of the ARM mobile phone platform. Ultimately I think this is Google's goal. They want to keep Android a mobile phone OS and position Chrome OS for netbooks, tablets, etc.

How will it work on a carrier's 3G network? My understanding was that even most tri-band GSM phones have a custom chip from the carrier in order to work on their particular 3G network. Is that incorrect? If not, how will a phone not tied to a carrier work on, say, T-mobile 3G?

You're more or less correct. Unless they're going to come out with a different "edition" of the phone for each carrier's flavor of 3G, I don't see how this can work.

There are two things to consider 1) SIM lock that ties a phone to a particular carrier. A Google phone wouldn't have a SIM lock unless it were subsidized by a particular carrier. 2) GSM bands. The phone could be quad-band GSM and work on any 3G network. Some recent GSM handsets omit one of the four bands to prevent roaming inside the US between T-Mob and AT&T.

GSM or CDMA?

I really hope it's GSM... I'm starting to weigh my options in terms of unlocked Android device to develop with.

If you buy a phone from T-Mobile (GSM), they will gladly unlock the device for you if you tell them that you will be traveling with the phone to Europe. Alternatively, you can purchase either the ADP1 or ADP2 phones directly from Google already unlocked.

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