Small Fish, Big Pond

I’ve been avoiding posting about the “Google” phone the tech world is raving about because I think its bad form to suppose too much about things that technically don’t exist yet. However more info is coming out about the supposed sales of the phone and guess what? It’s just another android phone.

When Google gave away free “Super Phones” to many of their staff the rumor mill went into high gear*. In usually fashion for new Google or Apple rumors or leaks some blogs began posting how we were on the brink of a revolution where the world of phone sales as we knew it was about to be turned on it’s head!!

You see the Google phone was rumored by these blogs and user coments (based on nothing other than their own speculation) that it would be sold at cost to the public without a carrier plan. Thus one phone would run on all networks, you could choose your own carrier and not worry about being locked into a 2 year contract. The price of the unlocked phone would still be competitive with subsidized phones and Google would lose money but would make up for it by having more people online at their sites getting ad revenue and traffic to the Google domain. It was supposed to be the beginning of many people’s dream of full access and integration into the cloud with the new Google phone as the access point.

However like most of these revolutionary rumors it bypasses a lot of basic realities of how non-techies see the world and big business do business among themselves. First off a phone needs a lot of extra crap on it to run on all phone networks crap that costs money and increases the price of the phone. Google would effectively be competing with the networks that were expected to provide service for the phone alienating the very people they’ll be relying on for the phone. And Google was competing with it own android phones already out there but not on a network.

Gizmodo today released a leaked sales page that outlines the reality of how the phone is going to be sold. Simply put, it’s being sold like any other phone by HTC; you can either pay a huge upfront price for the phone unlocked and unsubsidized then choose your carrier and plan. Or buy it on contract for a much reduced, subsidized price; but without the 2 year contract.

The good news is that it’s still a great phone and not just an experimental phone for Google employees. The market could use more good phones and more good ideas.

It’s just not going to be telecommunications revolution most people were misguidedly dreaming of.

* Case in point: Now that the revolutionize the business of smart-phones has been overturned TechCrunch is now rumoring that the phone has automatic backup software based off the sentence, “Charge your phone while streaming music and backing up your data”
Notice that that one line says nothing about automatic anything and that any phone that backs itself up can do so while in a dock to the computer.
This is a prime case of letting speculation get ahead of itself. The phone may automatically back itself up or it may not even come with integrated backup software, but because of a major tech blog’s speculation much of the tech community will assume that it now has automatic backup.

They’re also trying to keep the revolution line open with another article saying that the unlocked Nexus will work on any network. Again this is speculation based of an already sketchy leaked document. The document mentions working with T-mobile, so the hardware will only work with T-Mobile and AT&T but likely not AT&T’s high speed HSDPA network which runs on a different technology from T-Mobiles 3G network. That would relegate the google phone which relies highly on internet access for cloud based services to dial up speeds.

Like I’ve said again and again, don’t let rumors outpace common sense. Right now all we likely have is a nice new HTC Android phone for T-Mobile.

Via Boy genius Report.