Here comes Google!
According to the Times Online in the UK, Google will be launching their own smartphone. The article states Google will offer free calls throughout the US and cheap international calls. The Google branded handset will run the new Android OS codenamed Flan, have a processor twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS, and a large touchscreen. Google wants their phone to be carrier agnostic.
The article in the Times Online goes on to say:
The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Googlephone to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile.
“We’ve never had this situation, where a single vendor controls the entire stack, from the operating system right up to Google’s cloud services,” says Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Northeast Securities. “It changes the competitive and bargaining dynamics like never before.”
I have been saying since I started this blog that the mobile phone wars would heat up. That will in turn increase competition, drive down prices, and cause widespread adoption. I did not expect this to happen so fast and that Google would throw down the gauntlet in this way. This should be fun to watch. If Google can really pull off free calls from any where that could be another paradigm shift like the first iPhone was.
The implications for education are limitless. I still believe in due time school networks will be irrelevant. Students will just access the cloud via a cellular network and bypass the schools network all together.
