Google Android means a smartphone in every pocket
In San Francisco this week Google announced its latest, cutting edge developments to an audience of 5,000 software developers and engineers – there was a plan to get the internet onto TV screens, to integrate broadcast programmes with downloadable, on-demand ones, and a preview of a more advanced mobile phone operating system than anybody, including Apple, has come up with anywhere else.
The pace of innovation was palpable, but speed is not everything, however. In a post-announcement press conference, Google was asked why it was taking on Apple when Nokia owns more than 40 per cent of the mobile phone market. Implicitly, the suggestion was that highfalutin talk of multi-tasking, wi-fi hotspot-creating, music-buying, map-replacing phones was leaving the mass market behind.
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In fact, the opposite seems to be true: the elitist smartphones of today are set to be ubiquitous within a matter of months or years. HTC, the company that has led the way with developing the smartest phones, last week announced the Wildfire – it does almost everything top of the range models do, but is aimed firmly at the middle market. Google is giving the power of the latest phones to everyone, just like it made the web available to 
everyone, even when the majority of people thought it would only ever be a niche concern. In doing so, it stands to make more money than ever before because more people will see the adverts that form the core of its business.
Mobile phone operators, too, are realising that currently quite expensive smartphones are what increasing numbers of people want, and where increasing profits are to be made. Virgin Mobile, for instance, trumpeted its early adoption of the HTC Desire – still the best phone on the market by a decent distance – but for the first time the emphasis was on a dual track: it did amazing things, the company said, from email to music, but it was also available free on a £25 a month contract. Now, with a bit of negotiation, it can be had for even less.
Andy Rubin, the Google designer who is in charge of the Android operating system, put it simply: “any phone we build today will be in the emerging markets within 12 months”. And while Google is profitable today on a scale few thought possible, it will be even more so if every demographic across the globe is using the internet on new devices.
The company sees profit simply in making sure every citizen has the whole internet in their pocket and is looking, sometimes at least, at advertising that is served by Google. It’s a democratisation of technology on a grand scale, with a profit so vast that Google doesn’t need to adopt the anti-competitive practices that many of its rivals have previously stood accused of.
Rubin pointed out another thing, too: the Android operating system is, because developers are allowed to freely do with it as they choose, being put in more and more devices. By being free, it removes about 15 per cent of the cost of a standard mobile phone, but is also consequently in heating systems and washing machines, and TV set-top boxes. That probably doesn’t mean your boiler is going to start showing you adverts; but Android provides a new means for, say, energy providers to point out that they’re cheaper than your current provider, or for your fridge to start talking directly to Tesco.com. All this is a part of the operating system that runs smartphones.
So “smart” technology, from mobile phones initially, is moving out along a range of avenues, and into a host of new demographics. That presents the possibility of the web being more beneficial to all our lives than ever before.
But in fact it’s a commercial imperative that is rolling the web’s reach across boundaries: the more people who go online and buy products, the more people who see adverts, the more money Google and other providers or retailers will make. When companies talk about democratising technology, in fact they’re talking about their bottom line, and the difference between profit and loss.
So HTC hasn’t plucked the name for its new handset out of nowhere: it’s a product that deserves to spread like wildfire, because it brings the full benefits of the web to every user at a knockdown price. But Google’s message with all of its new announcements is clear: internet adoption brings social benefits – and economic ones, too, for companies even more so than individuals.
By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor
telegraph.co.uk
Posted on:May 22, 2010, 8:00 am
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