Total speculation on Google’s mobile plans

by: admin Monday, October 29th, 2007

Rating: Forget WiMax and Wi-Fi. What about
Bluetooth?

Seeing as just about everyone and their dog
seems to be involved with speculating as to what Google might possibly be up to
in the mobile space, I thought it must be my turn.

What evidence has anyone got to go on? Well the most obvious source is the
phrasing of the job ads the company keeps placing. Those who firmly believe that
Google is building its own mobile handset took heart from the fact that Google
obligingly place job ads for engineers with RF experience.

The reality is that Google is almost
certainly working on multiple projects and my intuition is that the company is
very definitely working on a software suite that will run on as many existing
handsets as possible. That’s because he job ads mention Symbian, Palm, Windows
Mobile, Java and even Linux.

The Java bit is also virtually a certainty
because Google just happened to acquire a company called Reqwireless – which produced
a software suite based on J2ME.

So what might form the components of this
suite? Well, there’s no marks for saying that Search will be included. A mobile
version of Google Earth would also be fantastic. Think about the applications
for LBS [Location Based Services]. It would be ideal.

The tricky bit is email. Will the company
simply go with a mobile orientated version of Gmail? What about something more
radical? A client that combines IM with texting and uses Presence to decide
which mode of transport to use at the current time?

My favourite, however, is a reference in
one of the job ads to "large scale cluster computing". Now this could
be very interesting. What if this cluster actually meant a whole bunch of
mobile phones? You could build on a facility that has been long dormant in
Bluetooth which provides for a PAN (Personal Area Network).

In effect you could provide a peer-to-peer
network which would enable handset owners to share all the content which never
actually seems to leave people’s phones. They could share it via Bluetooth as
well as Wi-Fi, WiMax and good old 3G/cellular.
Even if I’m wrong, some-one else might think it’s a good idea and develop the
software anyway.

One Response to “Total speculation on Google’s mobile plans”

Ramon Said:

It’s oficial already gtalk for blackberry, http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk/

Google also already has a suite of softwares for mobiles, google earth not yet available due to device capacity.

Great idea on the clustering over bluetooth, problem still would be phone processing capacity, it would be a lot cheaper to just buy a plain old PC and cluster from there.
So the clustering is probaly not viable from an economic point of view for now..
But I believe Wimax is cheaper and just better from not only an economic perspective but also from a technical, and yes we can bet on wimax with bluetooth.

Great point on LBS, that’s probaly the main argument for an open spectrum, every operator and manufacture just locks in the features and nobody can use the network and phone features like LBS (except for the “GPS” phones) and others which can bring a hole new set of features to software providers.

Comment made on October 29th, 2007 at 11:59 am