I Predict a Winner!
Posted by Thomas Schonenberger on 24 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Mobile Search
Once again I am delighted at yet more free stuff from Google, with Google Buzz gracing our smartphones (albeit some fairly sever privacy issues, and corresponding lawsuits)! I have an Android phone, made by HTC, and have been absolutely loving it! I can safely say it is the best phone I have had and it is very much down to the freedom that the operating system offers. Google integration is naturally seamless – enter your account information once when setting up the phone and everything thereafter just works. Whether I am on my desktop computer or out and about, it all just comes together (I can hear the voices out there muttering “But what about privacy!” but actually I am not that perturbed – in my opinion it means I need to wade through less cr@p and get targeted stuff instead)!
Maps have always been critical to me, walking or driving in London, (or even in South Africa these days). I was a big fan of the Nokia N95, and then the N82, especially because of Nokia Maps. I was highly disappointed when they decided to remove the tracking feature from their latest version. Up until that point was happy not to subscribe to the full version as I could just plot a route and keep myself on course. They then removed this feature and Nokia Maps became problematic for me – unless I paid them money I couldn’t use the maps for directions. Google to the rescue – Tracking was always enabled, and now they have routing and soon we will have turn by turn here in the UK. Not to mention things like traffic updates, and other experimental “Layers”. Again, great free stuff, much to the dismay of TomTom’s shareholders! Next in the firing line – Estate agents!
Some applications such as Latitude have questionable value but Picasa is really a lovely piece of software. Being able to tag people, simply share photos and upload to web albums makes life a breeze. On Android the sharing options are really broad – you can pretty much send anything anywhere. I really don’t feel constrained with my media. Videos to you tube or pictures to web albums are a synch. Just the other night I did a price comparison via an app, and wanted to save the result for later. After a briefs moment of hesitation as how to bookmark it, I just opted to “Share” and immediately had a host of options from simply emailing the link to saving it into my notes (Which automatically synchronise online and onto my desktop as well). Just so effortless! And I have not even begun to explore the masses of applications sitting in Google Labs.
But to come back to the point at hand. With mobile becoming ever more essential in our lives this platform (Android) and the ease at which I have everything at my fingertips, in my eyes, puts Google leaps and bounds ahead of any other provider. I see this as a solid foothold and being vendor independent, I believe it is only a matter of time before Apple gives up its spot as top dog! Lets not forget all this free stuff is there to gain market penetration – Google will monetise it all with ad spend, but I don’t mind – in my eyes I am getting things that make a positive difference in my life, all for free.
