Nothing to see here

5 November 2007

As I suspected all along, there is no gPhone – no consumer hardware product from Google, an ostensibly software company. Unsurprisingly instead, we get a mobile phone operating system instead.

Or do we?

Clue one is that ‘Android’ (Google is all about the friendly product names…) is based on Linux. Not an Operating System as such then, but a GUI I guess. Well, except we haven’t actually seen it, so that could well be an existing mobile linux-based GUI (and don’t go thinking that running a mobile on Linux is exciting, there are plenty already on the market). Anyway; the GUI probably doesn’t matter too much, as it’s all about the web browser, apparently – which I’m sure won’t just be a mobile version of Firefox.

Oh.

Wait.

Didn’t Mozilla just announce a mobile version of Firefox? And don’t lots of Firefox developers work for Google?

Apparently this new mobile platform ”...will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today” which tells you absolutely nothing about the capabilities of ‘Android’ but all you need to know about how far the traditional marketing types have wormed their way into Google. Knowing absolutely nothing is in fact the theme of this announcement, as that’s what we know about the important bits of the platform – like what the user experience is like, what capabilities it has and what applications it will run.

All we seem to have is a blog post, a video with children in, a video with a dog in and a slightly nasty corporate site with some looks-like-clip-art.

I have a great amount of respect for Google but I don’t trust them enough to take ‘Android’ (or should that be ‘Open Handset Alliance’ – I’m not sure which to use) on faith. They’ve made enough mistakes and shovelled out enough bad UIs to be a long way from the ‘free pass’ that this non-annoucement indicated they seem to think they have. In fact, I’m not at all convinced that Google can pull off doing a mobile UI at all – they have 3 decent UIs in their stable (Google itself, Gmail and Google Calendar) and none of them are really that amazing. Certainly, people don’t look to Google for amazing UI design like they do to Apple.

And Apple is very much who they are aiming at with this one; judging by the timeline the first ‘Android’ powered phones will probably be competing with v2 of the iPhone for the Christmas market next year – that’s certainly going to be an interesting one to watch. There’s two pertinent points in this fight: Firstly, the hardware is hugely important – and one of the reasons Apple is doing so well – and Google is no better off then anyone else in this respect.

Secondly – and most amusingly – Apple is already competing openly in Google’s playground; the iPhone ships with a brilliant web browser, which happily runs all of Google’s current applications now. For Google to compete effectively with the iPhone, they’re going to have to stop using the web browser to run their applications which goes against pretty much everything they stand for.

They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.