Ok, it’s official now, Google has acquired Jaiku! If you don’t know, Jaiku is mini-blog social networking platform especially suitable to use with mobile phone devices. Unlike Twitter and recently Pownce, Jaiku was never gained much popularity among users for some reason. Now, that Google owns the platform, things are about to change. Google already owns some popular web services: YouTube,Blogger,Gmail, Google Earth, Google maps and many more smaller services within google.com portal. Another rumour that has been spreading on the Internet is that google is about to make it’s own version of a mobile phone device called “gPhone” It is very likely that gPhone is going to be similar to apple’s iPhone and it will use same touch-sensitive technology iPhone uses. Here is what, in my opinion, could make gPhone the best mobile phone device ever:
Operating system: iPhone uses OS X as a platform which makes it unique to other mobile devices on the market. gPhone thus has to find as unique platform to use, so it can compete with the iPhone. Developing a new operating system for a mobile device can be rather expensive and risky. Google needs to adopt already developed solution. So guys, do you remember BeOS? It was a great operating system but lack of software and hardware support forced developers to shut down the original project. BeOS variations still exist, (see Zeta OS) but they can not be considered a serious OS for a PC again because of lack of software and hardware support. I think it would be great for Google to acquire say Zeta OS and modify it to make a brand new mobile platform that would be used with gPhone. BeOS is very similar to OS X. It’s powerful and it has friendly GUI. I remember back in 1998 when I first tried the original BeOS, I was really impressed. It had great graphic and networking performances combined with an intuitive interface that looks like NEXT.
Application support: Google does not have to be worried about application support as they already own vast variety of services that all can be used on gPhone too. iPhone for instance already uses YouTube. Gmail is the most popular web based e-mail service and it’s very reliable and most important, it’s free! With a few modifications made, (IMAP support) gmail could seamlessly work with gPhone. It would be integrated into the OS just like .Mac service is seamlessly working with OS X. Putting together Blogger and Jaiku would be great, and I don’t need to mention Google Earth and Google maps as we all know what kind of potential they have.
Hardware tweaking: Google has had enough time to see how competitors (LG-Prada and Apple) are going with their products. Now, if they are smart enough, they can correct all mistakes made by LG and Apple hardware-wise. I hope they will be able to do the job right.
What now you are asking yourself? What’s missing? I think the missing link is that Google does not have an online music store. Both Apple and Yahoo have one. It would be great if Google could offer a wi-fi music store. I am really looking forward to seeing if Google is up to the challenge of developing a mobile phone device. Good luck!!
October 11, 2007 at 6:40 am |
“… gPhone thus has to find as unique platform to use, so it can compete with the iPhone.”
Who says the gPhone has to compete with the iPhone?
After all, there’s a Googler on the Apple board, so it’s worth giving that relationship some consideration.
Additionally, the iPhone makes good use of current Google services like Google Maps. And with Google Transit coming out of the laps recently, look out for some extra map features on the iPhone.
If it is the case that Google are hoping to get into the mobile phone market, their strategy could be similar in scale & scope to their software — simple, arguably basic, no-frills but highly utilitarian…
October 11, 2007 at 9:49 am |
Jaiku is quite popular with the Non-US for some reason. I have had an account for a while, but never got into it.
January 23, 2009 at 12:45 pm |
google has android http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system), why should it even consider bying BeOS ?