Recently I've been asked a few times what I thought about the iPhone compared to the potential gPhone product. I haven't posted about it until now because I didn't really think the two had much to do with each other at all. 

The reason that I refer to this post as a "Celebrity Death Match" is because the gPhone is currently nothing more than rumor. Certainly there are a lot of indicators that something tangible will come out of the rumors, but at this point all we have is rumor and speculation to go on.

However, we do know a couple of key differences between what Google wants to do in its plans to take over the world compared with how Apple plans to take over the world. I think this gives some insight on how the two phones should be examined and compared.

Firstly, the iPhone is a physical device manufactured by Apple. The Google Phone or gPhone will more than likely not actually refer to a single physical device, but rather a platform that can be used by any mobile device manufacturer who so chooses. gPhone is more analagous to Windows Mobile than to say, the Motorola Q.

The Google Phone or gPhone platform or whatever they end up calling it will more than likely provide users with the ability to consume Google Applications wirelessly from any location. I'm thinking you'll see Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Google Reader, Maps, Search, and maybe the spreadsheets one, though who knows - this is all complete speculation.

One thing of which I am pretty sure is that the gPhone will not be wrestling with the iPhone over market share. I doubt the two devices (or, rather, one device and one device platform) will be compared very much at all - I don't think it's an Apples to Apples (har har) comparison - it's Apples and Oranges.

The iPhone is a high-end consumer device that plays music, takes pictures, plays videos, has iTunes on it, magically downloads the currently playing song inside Starbucks, and oh yeah, has a damn good phone.

In my own personal opinion, the gPhone will be an open-source linux-based framework that will be given to phone manufacturers free of charge for the sole purpose of de-throning Windows Mobile as the market leader in mobile device platforms.

So, if you ask me , we shouldn't be looking at how the Google Phone will impact the iPhone, we should be looking at how the Google Phone (or phones, given the notion that it's probably a platform not a device) will impact Windows Mobile. Google's big problem right now to me is that their apps are all pretty mediocre. Sure, maps is impressive, but it's still just "meh, it's a map. I can get that from anybody." The big thing that is making them money right now is critical mass. They have a crapload of fans and are enjoying what I believe to be an ever-decreasing Halo effect. At some point, people will stop worshipping Google and they'll have to cough up a real product. Until that time, allowing mobile device manufacturers to do Google's convergence work for them and provide a framework for integrating the myriad of semi-useful Google Apps into one package might be a huge thing for Google.

Regardless, I don't see anybody dropping their iPhones for a gPhone-toting mobile device.

That said - if you want to win mobile device market share, you need to win the hearts of mobile device developers. At the moment, Windows Mobile is king. Why? .NET Compact Framework or traditional Windows-style mobile device development. If Google comes out with nothing more than an overengineered client/server JavaScript model for their phone, they won't get many developers clamoring to jump ship and abandon Windows Mobile development.

P.S. - There are also rumors that Google plans to do some kind of announcement about their phone today, so I'll keep the comments filled here if I see anything regarding the phone.

Edit: So it seems as though a few minutes after I wrote this blog entry, Google put forth the announcement about Android, a project named after the company they purchased a while back. Google is essentially spearheading an open source project that is an open SDK for mobile devices that runs on a variant of Linux optimized for mobile devices. This could be good or bad for them - they'll need a critical mass of partners who adopt this platform to provide a large enough ecosystem to attract developers. Devs are freaking busy these days, and none of us have time to learn yet another SDK without some reasonable assurance that someone will actually use the software we're building.

Bottom line: There are over 1,000,000 iPhones in the wild, a bunch of iPod touches in the wild - all targets for iPhone-style web applications now, and potential iPhone SDK targets in February. I probably won't download the SDK until the number of phones running Android is equal or higher. In short, I'm not holdin' my breath. 

tags: iphone  gphone
links: digg this  del.icio.us  technorati  reddit