Monday, November 12, 2007

What's the Google Phone all about?

Talk about thinking about outside of the box. Google as done it again. The problem with the American cell phone market is that no one is happy with their phones. (iPhone users included) With the big 4 cell phone service providers having a grip on their market that they're not willing with let go the people suffering the most are the customers. People are stuck with phones with different operating systems that don't mix well together, have limited features and some horribkly stupid features that no one will use.

Apple has taken a step in the right direction with the iPhone. Apple did what they do best, give you a slick user interface that was a welcomed breath of fresh air to the cell phone industry. At the last several cell phone trade shows almost no one is talking about the iPhone; the bar has been raised and the competition knows that they can't compete.

The part where Apple screwed up was when they compromised with the portion of the business that they're too small to take care of themselves; the actual cell phone service. When signing up with AT&T, Apple went over to the dark side. All of a sudden you have a handset that is locked to a single carrier and users will be punished for trying to unlock the device itself. What's more is that it has been found out that Apple is making $849.00 per iPhone from AT&T over the life of the two year contract. Now Apple looks just like every other cell phone maker because they've given into the corporate model of milking the customer for all they're worth while being chained to a single provider.

So where is Google going to fix this idea? Well Google did the best thing they could; they DIDN"T develop a phone. Google has announced "Android" which will be their open source platform to be used on upcoming LG, Palm, Nokia, HTC, T-Mobile, Qualcomm & Motorolla handsets. This will help this biggest problem of all; having a mutual platform that will translate well between cell phone makers and cell phone service providers. Now all we have to do is get the service providers to stop these two year agreement death traps.