Google launches its mobile phone
It came as no great surprise to industry watchers when, on January 5th, Google unveiled its Google-branded, Google-designed Nexus One mobile phone.
The handset is built for Google by HTC and it runs Google's Android Operating System for mobile phones. As well as the things you would expect of a phone these days, such as a 480x800 colour screen and a five megapixel camera, it also includes some unusual hardware features such as a second microphone to implement noise-cancelling, enabling the phone to be used clearly even in noisy environments, and software features such as voice activated dialling. Most importantly though, it was designed to allow Internet access, and to interface well with Google's many services such as mail, maps and YouTube.
Compared to Apple's iPhone which was an instant hit and a must have accessory for the fashionable, early sales of the Nexus were sluggish, estimated at around 20,000 world wide. It isn't cheap. Indications are that it will be sold in Europe for £179 plus the cost of an 18 month calls package, or £529 as an unlocked phone without a calls contract. That's more than the cost of a decent laptop.
Will its Internet features turn it into a winner? Accessing the Internet by mobile phone appears frequently in trendy and stylish TV programs, and some sites such as YouTube and Facebook probably receive a significant chunk of traffic from mobiles, but for many websites, internet access just isn't an attractive proposition. Websites which want to lure mobile phone users need to think carefully about what sort of data the mobile phone user is looking for.
In a recent study of British mobile phone users, researchers found that 60% of mobile phone users didn't have a handset capable of connecting to the internet and only a third of that group expressed any interest in getting a phone that would allow internet browsing. Of the Smart Phone users (mostly Apple iPhones), 31% had never used it to access the internet, and 8% had used it once to go online, but never again whilst 24% said they did use it to go online, but less than once per week. Mostly it was used for social networking sites like Twitter. Cost and ease of use seem to be the key reasons behind this apathy towards accessing the internet from the phone.
28th January 2010
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.