Interested in the Google phone, but not excited
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the upcoming Google phone, mostly on my friend Sean’s blog, GeekWithLaptop. ;) He made a great point when he said:
The fixation on a Google phone, however, may be misplaced. Unlike Apple, Google isn’t known for its elegant integration of hardware and software. Google’s expertise is in software, massively parallel supercomputing, and commodity hardware for data centers. It’s difficult to see how Google’s involvement would add value to the physical aspects of mobile handsets.
My sentiments exactly. I have a Gmail account and I use their analytics service on a few of my websites. Everything I have ever touched from Google feels highly engineered, not necessarily well designed. That is not to say that they don’t do a great job with interface design, but it’s not the kind of elegance that makes me want to give up my email client or start managing projects exclusively on their platform.
Google changed the face of design for a search engine when they reduced the home page down to a single function; which, at the time, flew in the face of the accepted wisdom held by AltaVista and Yahoo!. That move was definitely good design. However, their search pages and the rest of their suite is an entirely utilitarian look and feel, which isn’t what I want from my phone.
I’m also very concerned about the role advertising will play on the Gphone. Google is almost 100% supported by ad revenue and they work that model into every product they release. I’ve had numerous discussions with industry professionals about the anticipation for advertising to really break into the mobile space, and you can be sure the Gphone will be working to usher it in. I know it’s coming, I just don’t want it to be integrated by the phone maker itself. I feel like it is important to separate the ad platform from the hardware in order to provide users with the strongest possible control over their advertising exposure (not that hackers couldn’t fix that :D).
Nevertheless, I have a lot of love for Google, so I am quite interested to see what they are going to bring to the table. Hopefully it’s not the maroon interface that I’ve seen circulating online. ;)
If you want to read the details for the Google phone, check out Sean’s information dense posts on the Google phone.
You can delete this if you have to but I can’t help myself:
Instead of motrolla’s “Can you hear me now?”
On the Gphone it will be where is the Gspot?
Now I have Great reception!
Hehe!
That would sell a lot of phones eh? LoL!
From sabrina on September 4th, 2007 at 1:37 pm