Google's G1: A Paradigm Shift in Mobile Phones

The G1 event has come and gone and it looks like we’re seeing an epic paradigm shift in the mobile space. iPhone started the ball rolling and Android is about the finish the job. The change? Phones are now officially computers and the expectation for most users is that they behave in the same way a powerful laptop or desktop PC would perform, albeit in a considerably more compact package.

I was struck by something during the G1 presentation Tuesday and it took me a quite a while to figure out what it was. Back in 1997-98 while I was at Carnegie Mellon we were at a crossroads in IT. The web was taking off in a general way and email was king for college students. The school was full of computer clusters - some Mac, some PC, and some greenscreen Unix dumb terminals in the library running X Windows. While the Macs and PCs were easy to understand and run, you could just tell that the Unix machines were like an iceberg - 98% of the power is under water, unseen by the average user. Putting the G1 through its paces showed a intense attention to detail on the part of Google (GOOG) and a tacit promise from the phone that it was far more powerful than originally described. This is G1’s blessing and curse.

T-Mobile will have a hard time selling Android phones. Unlike Windows Mobile, with its loosey goosey promise of Windows compatibility or the endless feature lists of some of the more basic phones, the G1 offers a platform for multiple amazing things, all arrayed to the user in a non-trivial way. Unless the company pulls back and begins describing the G1 in Mac/PC terms - where Mac is not compared to the PC but is instead the PC experience magnified - they will lose people who eye Google with trepidation or are worried about compatibility with their existing mail and desktop systems.

G1 is the future smartphone. It is where Symbian should have been two years ago and it’s the wall Windows Mobile will slam into in the next year. The “Android Market” aka App Store will hopefully be a robust microcosm of desktop apps writ small and the various manufacturers making Android phones will have quite a bit of leeway in terms of interface and functionality. In fact, I’d say that the G1 is a beta device, designed for us nerds by nerds like Sergey and Larry. As Joel Johnson wrote:

“I’ve been using this phone, well, for a while now,” said Page. He’d even taken it home and written an application for it that, using the accelerometer, would measure how long a tossed phone would remain in the air. That one of the heads of Google still goes home at night and tinkers with code speaks volumes about the culture from which Android is born.

Android is what that X terminal was to me back in the day and what Linux is to us all right now - a strong platform on which to build. If it becomes popular, Google will essentially connect all of us to their giant grid and control all of our inputs and outputs. If it fails it will encourage a new group of geeks to take it and build upon it, turning Android into something like BSD to Apple’s OS X. Either way, it’s a win win for the programmer and the geek and, in a way, the average consumer. Now, however, the only trick is to convince casual smartphone users that this - and not anything Redmond or RIM has to offer - is what they want.

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Comments

[Network Effect:]

you are drinking too much of that google KoolAid buddy. the game you are talking about is more than likely going to be won by Apple. you are right, this is the future. but google will not win, and all signs point to that apple will. pretty soon, large companies are going to start partnering up to beat Apple because they are having so much success with the AppStore and all of its hardware. it will steamroll industries. i think EBAY, with Skype and PayPal, is ripe for the picking because it's cheap and they have all the tools for a mobile commerce platform. and so is RIMM because their management is top notch and they already have the base of users in the mobile space. one of these companies will be bought out in the next 1-2 years.

2008 Sep 23 05:23 PM

[Epsilon:]

GOOG has HTC on their side, which is very bad news for Windows Mobile, since HTC is basically providing all of the innovation on the WM platform- even devices like the Sony Ericsson Xperia and the Palm Treo Pro have HTC involved somewhere- they're not well-known in the US market because their devices are usually re-branded by the carriers, but they're big overseas. So if HTC starts shifting away from MSFT and towards GOOG's platform, it's bad news for Windows Mobile.

I don't see why everyone thinks there's going to be a "winner" here who gets a Windows-like share of the phone market... iPhone will have customers, Android will have customers, BlackBerry will maintain its hold on the Business market... the big question is whether Android will supplant Windows Mobile as the platform of choice for manufacturers who don't control their own platform.

2008 Sep 23 09:27 PM

[Billy Staples:]

Good Morning

when we all first learned of the collection of companies who joined the Android 'club' of whatever it was called at the time.

If I recall there were 20 or so companies, not all phone makers or designers, but part and participle suppliers. One that comes to mind is arguably the touch screen creator and definitely innovator, Synaptics. where do the other companies who make or manufacture pieces, like chips,batteries processors who knows. I know the internals of a phone like what is really in a hot dog.

anyway, where do they figure into, 'their piece of the pie' so to say?

Billy Staples

thedarksize.com thedowjokesreport.com

2008 Sep 24 09:17 AM

[JW PhD:]

This newest iPhone "killer" is a complete JOKE. Here's what you're buying for your whopping $20 off the price of an 8GB iPhone 3G:

1GB of onboard storage
No standard 3.5mm headphone jack
1GB/mo data limit over 3G
Heavier, thicker form factor w/ smaller screen
No Exchange compatibility
T-Mobile's woefully inadequate 3G coverage

Yeah, quite a deal. HTC sure didn't do Google any favors putting out this clunker for the debut of Android.

2008 Sep 24 12:12 PM

[Fremont Rea...:]

What I really want is my cell phone to synch with my car's bluethooth and provide real time traffic info on nav screen.

2008 Sep 24 12:22 PM