Google announcement monday. gPhone? other?

All the rumor mongering about the gPhone has been successfully ignored by me, until this one. Apparently, on Monday, Google is going to officially announce their plans for a gPhone. Now of course that doesn’t mean there will be a gPhone. They could be having the announcement to tell everyone to shut the hell up, because they are not making one. Or they could be saying they bought apple and now all that i-shit you own is now going to be rebranded g-shit.
Realistically I do think google will get into the phone arena, and this announcement is probably that they are going to. Will it be hardware, or just the OS, or their own cellphone company, etc. There have been so many rumors to cover it all, that I don’t really care to mention the possibilities. However, I do think some common sense can be applied to some rumors.
They are starting a Google cellphone carrier… NO. Why would they? There is no point in trying to compete against the beasts that already exist, and who already do a decent job (comeon they do). If google was to become their own carrier, I think that would be bad news. Too much effort would be required in a brand new arena. Sure it is communications, and technically they are communication company, but it wouldn’t make sense to start tackling nationwide technology infrastructure deployments, when it’s already there. They didn’t build their own internet, why would they build their own cellular network.
They are going to make an answer to the iPhone… Sure, they might contract with a cellphone manufacturer to make a google phone, but if we are talking about making and iPhone-like touchscreen with no buttons, then who cares? It then becomes just an interface to an OS. The different looks and styles of the assorted cell phones that exist is because of all the buttons. Make it smaller, make it flatter, make it bright, make it shiny. But when you eliminate all the buttons, and just have a touch screen, why would you do anything more than making the device as thin and light as possible, while providing as long a battery life as possible, and as big a screen as possible. The iPhone is not a marvel of physical design, it is just a shell to hold the OS. Do I think it looks pretty when its off (since the OS shouldnt count)? Of course I do. However, it’s a freaking rectangle with rounded corners. Big deal. The OS however is the big deal, and that was the revolution/revelation. So device-wise, who cares if google is going to produce a google branded piece of hardware? It’s just a container to hold what really counts, which is the OS.
So now to the OS. Google is going to make a cellphone OS… YES. I think this is the whole point, and like I said about the hardware, it really is irrelevant what box you put it in… let that sink in for a minute. What if Google is building a Non-OS. Why do you need to build in all the features when you can just have them available online through a webpage? The iPhone almost does this, except for the assorted applications that are built in, like a calculator,calendar,contacts, etc. Why though do you even need to do that? Why not make every single thing on your phone be an AJAX webpage (or somethng else but you get my point)? Why not make the phone able to be literally an empty shell with no applications on it at all, if you wanted to. All the OS would provide is an interface between the hardware, such as the speaker, mike, bluetooth, camera, etc, and the applications.
Why now does it even have to be a phone…
You need a calculator? Turn on your device, hit the “get stuff” button. Navigate to or search for a calculator, and do some math. Want it available even when you are out of cell range? Hit “save this app to my device”. All you are really doing is caching the ‘webpage’ and marking it as do-not-delete.
Although the iPhone made the leap of eliminating the hardware buttons, they did not make the leap all the way. This is because of the philosophy of Apple, which I understand, which is ‘control your product, to control your image’. But Google I think has the ability to move a little beyond that thinking process. Google can make the leap to the final step, which ironically is a step back in time to thin-clients. The mainframe-thinclient methodology dies off a few years ago (mostly), but it is now back, even though people may not have noticed.
Google and a few other companies have noticed, and are obviously embracing it. Google apps and Zoho to mention 2 I have experience with, provide you with most of the applications that a majority of people need. Open up that line of thinking to the world of coders, and you become limitless. Facebook did it with their API allowing hundreds of thousands to make applications that work within the Facebook ‘OS’. Google just launched the OpenSocial to do the same. There are many other companies out there who provide a framework upon which anyone can build applications for public consumption.
If Google is going to announce anything of real value, it will have to be this: they are building or releasing an extremely lightweight OS that will run on any hardware platform, from a small handheld to a large desktop (if you wanted to), that will provide an infinitely expandable framework upon which both online and offline applications can be built.
Anything less than that, and its just another iPhone…