GPhone

[Maxman]

Check this article out from techcrunch. I thought this was very interesting:

Rumors of an impending Google phone coming out early next year have been heating up since late summer. Google is thought to be in talks with several phone manufacturers, including HTC and Samsung, to create mobile phones around its platform. Search Engine Land has a handy timeline of most of the rumors up through late August.

Today, the NYT weighs in, suggesting that Google

[joebabyny]

The one hangup i have about this google phone is the rumor that it will be free. Now, a free phone with free service sounds great, but it forces you into this advertising thing where you will be forced to hear advertising whenever you use the phone, not something i think people are looking to sign up for even to save 20-50 bucks a month. Look at cable tv and sat radio, people are paying for more and more commercial free services. There definitely would be a ton of people who would flock to this idea, mostly teens and lower income adults, but these would be terrible demographics for advertisers, and affluent young people may view the free phone as cheap or uncool.

I don't know, some of the ideas are great and google has some of the greatest minds in the tech sector working for them so they could knock it out of the park for sure, and i definitely think msft is ripe for a real competitor to windows mobile because they can't bring anything to market that is exciting or different.

[Maxman]

The one hangup i have about this google phone is the rumor that it will be free. Now, a free phone with free service sounds great, but it forces you into this advertising thing where you will be forced to hear advertising whenever you use the phone, not something i think people are looking to sign up for even to save 20-50 bucks a month. Look at cable tv and sat radio, people are paying for more and more commercial free services. There definitely would be a ton of people who would flock to this idea, mostly teens and lower income adults, but these would be terrible demographics for advertisers, and affluent young people may view the free phone as cheap or uncool.

I don't know, some of the ideas are great and google has some of the greatest minds in the tech sector working for them so they could knock it out of the park for sure, and i definitely think msft is ripe for a real competitor to windows mobile because they can't bring anything to market that is exciting or different.

I doubt it would be free. Too much revenue would be passed up if they did that. What I am curious about is the VOIP stuff. Why can't cell phones take advantage of it? It would end up being cheaper.

And like the article said they would tie adsense in with people who wrote apps. Google maps and tons of apps on your phone. The apps are free. People make money on the ads placed in their apps depending on views? Interesting and it has a lot of potential.

[joebabyny]

I doubt it would be free. Too much revenue would be passed up if they did that. What I am curious about is the VOIP stuff. Why can't cell phones take advantage of it? It would end up being cheaper.

And like the article said they would tie adsense in with people who wrote apps. Google maps and tons of apps on your phone. The apps are free. People make money on the ads placed in their apps depending on views? Interesting and it has a lot of potential.

Well, i doubt they would give you 5000 minutes a month, but yeah, they are considering doing it for free or extremely minimal amount. Of course this is speculation.

As to voip, i think that is really dead in the water until this whole net neutrality thing is settled. Besides, no carrier now would want to tie up their networks with the stuff or give the user the ability to completely bypass their cell network to make calls where no revenue goes to them. An interesting thing along these lines is that google is supposedly thinking of buying their own spectrum space, but i think it is tied into the net neutrality debate and how the government handles it.