What does the Google phone venture actually mean?

First things first: there will be no 'G-phone'.

No slick handset which a 'G' embossed on the front, no attempt by Google - not yet, anyway - to completely take charge of the way you interact with the world via your mobile.

What there is is the Open Handset Alliance: a broad coalition of partners from within the mobile industry, led by Google, who have agreed to collaborate on a free, openly available and customisable operating system for mobile phones.

In English? There's a move to make the internet much, much better on mobiles.

To understand what Google is trying to do with its new operating system, called Android, it's best to outline what they see as the problems with the way the internet has been offered on mobiles to date.

Many phones have not offered what you might call a 'full internet experience'.

The browser has been very limited, there's been an attempt by operators to control access to the internet via their own portals, users haven't enjoyed anywhere near the facility using the web that they're used to on their PCs.

Android is an attempt to counter that by 'opening up' a mobile phone's internet capability. No longer, so the Android logic goes, will device manufacturers like Motorola and HTC, or operators like T-Mobile have the final say in the way in the way the internet appears to owners of the device.

Instead a range of developers - people aiming to write the next YouTube or Facebook - will be free to write applications for devices which run on the Android platform and, in theory, users should be able to download as and when they like.

Put another way, Android enables the mobile phone to become a blank canvas on which the owner is free to paint with whatever web-based colours they choose: a Facebook or YouTube here, Google maps or Skype there.

It is to this rather seductive vision that the Open Handset Alliance's many partners - there are more than 30 - spoke when they talked about "quick and easy access to content and functionality that each individual finds most valuable" (Peter Chou, chief executive of HTC, the handset maker), "the mobile internet" being "more than any one vendor product"; a mixture of "web-based services, e-mail, personalisation and entertainment" (Ed Zander, chief executive of Motorola) and the Alliance "spurring rapid innovation" and "enabling customers to enjoy rich experience on their devices" (Paul Jacobs, chief executive of Qualcomm, the chip-set maker).

It all sounds rather wonderful.

Of course, it's easier in theory than in practice.

The mobile internet revenue model, as Google knows only too well, is to take a share in the advertising that is sold alongside various web-based services, be it search, maps, social networking applications, video or music.

Which means that providers of mobile services - Google among them - will still want to do deals with both handset manufacturers and operators to have their service or application appear prominently when a user plucks a phone off the shelf.

In other words, a phone's internet capabilities will, to some extent, still be 'mapped out' when a person signs up for a contract, and it remains to be seen how easy operators selling Android-powered phones will make it for customers to get new services.

If the popularity of sites like Handango, where users can download applications purpose built for their device, are anything to go by, users will eventually warm to the idea of 'application shopping' for their mobiles. But it will take a while to get there.

In the meantime, there's also the question of how fast an industry alliance - which takes in some of the largest networks, handset manufacturers and chipset providers in the world - can move towards this goal.

Carolina Milanese, an analyst at Gartner, said: "I'm less excited about this now I know it's not a specific Google handset."

At the start of the year, she pointed out, a similar type of alliance - with names like Motorola, Panasonic, NEC and Samsung - tried to engineer a shift towards an open, Linux-based platform for mobile phones, which was "pretty much exactly what the Open Handset Alliance is".

And the former didn't generate much momentum.

Then again, it didn't have Google at the helm. And these days, if it's an internet project - and Google is heading it up, momentum is a little easier to come by.
Jonathan Richards

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Are you interested in this type of technology for your phone (if you have one)?

There are already privacy issues relating to people taking pictures of others without their consent and posting them to the internet. With this type of technology, you could take a video with your phone and post it on YouTube all within minutes. What kinds of concerns can you see happening with this type of technology available?
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