Guess What: Google Is Making a Phone Now
It seems very likely that Google is planning to release their own phone; not ‘merely’ a phone based on their mobile operating system, Android, but the Google phone — their take on the iPhone. Michael Arrington thinks the phone won’t be a traditional cellphone, but rather rely on data connections/VoIP via Google Voice entirely. Google already has the technology (they can rebuild him?) to give users of its Google Voice service real phone numbers; it seems like a logical next step.
Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).
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.
I wonder if Google is having a serious go at world domination right now. First browsers, programming languages, operating systems, internet protocols, Wave, and now phones — where does it end? Oh well; for now, I don’t want it to.