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David Braue18 February 2010, 1:08 PM
The runaway popularity of Apple’s iPhone – and its scores of imitators – has turned them into the major focus for Google’s innovative developers, CEO Eric Schmidt has revealed.
“We understand that the new rule is mobile first,” he told an audience at this week’s Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. “It’s mobile first in everything, mobile first in terms of apps, mobile first in terms of the way people use things.”
That shift has been driven by the continuing explosion in subscriber numbers, with mobiles and wireless broadband services here and abroad far outstripping the growth of landline internet services. Recent figures from Telsyte found that Australian carriers added over 1 million new mobile users in the first half of 2009 alone, pushing the total number of mobile services to 24.5m and counting. The firm also pegged smartphones as accounting for around one-third of all phones sold during 2009, up from around 16 percent of business users and 12 percent of consumers previously.
With numbers like that, it’s hardly surprising to see that Google’s focus has shifted so quickly. Also unsurprising is its focus on voice: the company was early into the iPhone game with Google Mobile App, a search application that incorporates voice recognition. The company has subsequently launched Google Voice, seen as a threat to conventional carriers’ services, and is talking about once-futuristic applications such as the ability to speak with someone in a different language by having the phone automatically translate spoken words from one language, then synthetically speak the translation in another.
Other applications Schmidt mentioned – such as optical character recognition and translation of printed foreign-language text photographed using the smartphone’s camera, or the Google Goggles ‘augmented reality’ app that automatically recognises landmarks from photos – provide new ways of leveraging Google’s massive database of text, image, geospatial and other data.
Google’s mobile push has been emboldened by wide and growing support for its Android mobile operating system, which began as a pale challenge to Apple’s iPhone but has gained momentum to become a major platform for smartphone innovation.
Indeed, the rise of Android, and the competitive threat it posed to the iPhone, were widely cited as one of the main factors behind Schmidt’s departure from the Apple board of directors last year. The departure proved prescient, with Google releasing its own Android-based phone – the Nexus One (APC review here) – in January.
Android’s relatively open design has not only made it popular with third parties that baulk at Apple’s relatively restrictive App Store structure, but has become popular with carriers who want the freedom to customise the user interface they deliver to customers. Telstra, for example, this week announced it will sell its first Android-based phone, the new HTC Desire, starting in April.
Just how Apple will counter the rising momentum of Android remains to be seen – Steve Jobs recently alluded to what he called an ‘A++ update’ for the iPhone to come soon – but there are indications that Google’s mobile focus is starting to raise hackles in Cupertino. Recent rumours suggested Apple is considering changing the default search engine on the iPhone to Google’s arch-enemy, Microsoft’s Bing.
That might be considered the beginning of the end by many Apple hardcores, but it’s reflective of the rapidly changing dynamics of the market to which Google has now committed itself.