Introducing the Google Phone

A bold headline by The Boston Globe. But they have a pretty good reason for that.

Cambridge has a chocolate factory, and a Willy Wonka. The chocolate factory is Google's local research lab, located on the seventh floor of a Kendall Square office tower, and the resident Wonka is Rich Miner, a Google executive sometimes described as the company's vice president of wireless but officially a "technical staff member," according to a Google spokesman.

The golden ticket is a chance to see a prototype of Google's new mobile phone, which Miner has shown to a handful of Boston entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, some of whom have signed nondisclosure agreements and some of whom haven't.

Now I'm torn.

The Google Mobile Phone OS?

You probably heard about the rumored Google phone / OS, since this has been blogged to death many times already. My hesitation to jump in though is that nobody was really sure if indeed there's a hint of truth to this. If I remember it correctly, the image on the left of what is rumored to be a Google phone showed up around the same time Steve Jobs announced his baby to the world.

Things have changed though, with Crunchgear having the confirmation from a senior (and anonymous) HTC executive that the company has made around 20 devices for Google to test the new mobile OS on. Another blogger have claimed earlier to have gotten the confirmation from a Google insider (who, according to the blogger wasn't entirely sure if he can or can't talk about the rumored google phone) that Google is indeed working on a mobile phone.

Now engagdet is reporting that the project could have started around 2005 after Google acquired a mobile company called Android. At last, 2 years after we began to wonder about the fate of the technology and (talents) brought by this acquisition, things seem to be starting to make sense.

Google could indeed be developing a Mobile phone OS, and according to the Engadget article, it's based on Linux and offers a plethora of customizations targeted for hardware manufacturers. It has also been said that Google has the developing market as its target and that the Phone OS integrates very well with Google's products.

Having tried Motorola's linux-based handset, I strongly feel that the industry needs a mobile linux implementation that doesn't put a taint on the Linux name with such a crappy UI (not that Linux is known for it). With the iPhone setting the bar for what a good mobile phone UI is like, things are starting to become interesting.

New Nokia Models: Black is Back

I don't usually blog about mobile phones simply because following them can really become dizzying because of the speed at which new models arrive. I made a few exceptions though, with (of course) the iPhone, and my one-night fling with the Samsung Blackjack.



So add this to those two exceptions: According to the gadget blog GearFuse, Nokia is releasing new phones soon, and what caught my eye here is the new update to the super nokia phone N95. Now dubbed as a music edition, it features 8gig of internal memory and my favorite part: it now comes in black. One of my pet peeves in the previous version is that it got a cheap-ass material for its external enclosure that if you didn't know about its features (everyone knows it kicks iPhone's ass, feature-wise), you'd be hard-pressed to buy it because really, it just looks (and feels) like a cheap phone. Okay. Rant over, and thanks Nokia for listening to my thoughts, and probably to a million of your users' feedback. :)

For more details on these new phones, just read the post on Gearfuse.

(image taken without permission from GearFuse)

iPhone New York

I've been enjoying watching this for a few days now and I thought I'd share it here.
A cool unofficial 60 second ad for iPhone.