The Google phone: a major milestone for mobility
by Chris Lennartz
As I posted earlier today to Steve O’Hear’s commentary on the launch of the first Android-powered device, there are tremendous opportunities for all forms of mobile messaging to take a huge leap forward with a Google phone. It’s a major milestone for the mobile phone business and underlines the growing importance of high-function open-platform devices. These rich platforms hold great potential to enable the deployment of advanced functionality and bring innovative new messaging technologies to handsets (via applications on the device) - from visual voicemail and social networking to enterprise email and MIM.
Open platforms make it easier to deploy new messaging types to phones because it’s easier to write the applications to them and to the extent they become a standard, the applications can be deployed over a wide number of handsets more easily. In addition, larger color screens with better resolution makes the user experience of these applications better, and enables things that weren’t possible with smaller res screens (e.g., threaded conversations in the messaging application).
At the same time, we are pleased to see that Google wisely provides excellent support for ubiquitous and industry standard technologies like SMS and MMS at both the platform and application level. This is consistent with Google’s strategy of building upon and advancing widely deployed standard technologies, operator’s goals of leveraging existing investments, and the desire of consumers to communicate with as many people as possible. While high-function devices enable deployment of technologies like enterprise email, MIM, etc. They are still a fraction of all handsets deployed and will remain that way for sometime. It’s therefore imperative to support SMS, and MMS (which in some markets is at 95% penetration) to enable communication with those who don’t have these handsets.
Worth addressing, which I’ll do in a later post: the attendant security issues we should all be aware of as these platforms proliferate.
Airwide
