I Stand Corrected – Google Phone is Real
In a strange twist of events, a Google executive has confirmed the existence of a Google Phone. I have been corrected.
Apparently, this was an ultra-secret pet project of Larry Page. I still believe the time is not right for such a product, and it presents a strong conflict of interest for Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) to be on the board of directors of Apple.
I will say that the Google phone is not too much of a threat to the iPhone in that the iPhone targets style conscious consumers while the Google phone targets geeks and perhaps business people. We’ll see just how real this phone is when Google announces something officially.
People must keep in mind that Google must have thousands of products that don’t make it into production. While this product is more likely than others to appear on the market due to the backing of the founders, I don’t think it is poised to dominate the market, or even take a significant hold (at least today).
I wonder how location-sensitive the GooglePhone will be (either through GPS if they can make that cheap enough or through some clever signal-processing / triangulation-based method). That would be a boost for the popularity of Google Maps. Plus, that would be very useful information for context-based advertising. And I bet Google could do a lot by analyzing the travel / communication patterns of phone owners.
Imagine your phone showing ads for businesses within sight of you, finding information about a business by pointing your phone at it and pushing a button, or searching for “pizza near me” on Google Maps and seeing a list of nearby pizza places ranked by popularity according to call volume.
(That last example would require significant market share, of course, but I think that’s the sort of thing Google is dreaming of for this sort of venture.)
Comment by L33tminion — March 21, 2007 @ 12:07 am