In a singular blog post, the tech news sources went crazy. The Google Mobile Blog, which covers most of Google’s progress on mobile platforms, released a post on their “dogfood diet.” The blog publicly announced a new device that would test the mobile gadgetry of Google and use the Android platform.
The new gadget will be tested by Google employees and in the meantime, the consumer will wait and see what they have up their sleeve. But like any device that is given to testers, those beta users snap shots, give feedback, and give us the insider information. What follows is a complete breakdown of the impending Google phone and what that means for soon to be competitors (i.e, the Droid and iPhone).
For starters, we’ll look at the original blog post that lit the fire:
At Google, we are constantly experimenting with new products and technologies, and often ask employees to test these products for quick feedback and suggestions for improvements in a process we call dogfooding (from “eating your own dogfood”). Well this holiday season, we are taking dogfooding to a new level.We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.
Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details. We hope to share more after our dogfood diet.
TechCrunch.com was one of the first to break the news. The site says that the impending Google Phone will be Google-branded and sport an entirely Google-designed interface with Android 2.1. Along with being an advanced Google phone, the Android device will sport 1GHz Snapdragon processor that has already been tweeted as being surprisingly fast and snappy.
While the phone is being built by phone manufacturer, HTC, the phone will be entirely develop and customized by Google. This is without a doubt, going to be more Google than Motorola’s attempt with their Droid. The phone’s name is still up in the air, with some calling it the Nexus One and other sources touting it as simply the, Google Phone.
TechCrunch says that the phone won’t be sold by any carrier, but rather be a SIM-unlocked phone for GSM carriers. This is where TC may have diverged from a reasonable path. Evidence like Verizon and Google’s news suggests that if a new, unlocked Google phone is released that it will be both CDMA and GSM unlocked, and ready for essentially any network in the United States and abroad.
The OLED touchscreen is bright and super-high resolution. The phone is thinner than the Apple’s iPhone and features a 5 megapixel camera, which is comparable to Motorola’s Droid. And from the camera pictures that we see, it looks like the camera is once again inadequate and just seems to take simple shots.
A new voice-to-text feature is supposedly on-board, which would allow for super accurate dictation of emails, texts, etc. Similar to Ford’s new Sync technology, your phone could be told to send an email to a person and then you could speak the body of the email.
Here at MarketMatador.com, we speculate that the new Google Phone may be advertised as a data only phone, with a hope that phone companies will quickly offer data only plans that allow voice calls through applications like Skype. Wi-Fi may be the standard method of use for the phone, similar to Apple’s iPod Touch.
There’s no doubt that this phone will throw a wrench to Apple’s future iPhone sales and also the Droid’s recent success. Expect the phone in the second quarter of 2010 for an unfriendly, unlocked, unsubsidized price of $550+.
Stay tuned for more information on the Google Phone as we receive it.
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