People who don’t even speak the same language will soon be able to have live conversations and Google phone cameras will translate items like foreign restaurant menus in seconds, the search giant’s chief executive said today.

But Google’s constant stream of innovations is puzzling analysts and frightening telco reps, who are unsure whether the company is a friend or “frenemy”.

In his keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said the company had shifted its focus from desktops to mobiles.

“Now our programmers are doing work on mobile first, and that is in fact a change … [our] top programmers want to work on those [mobile] apps,” he said.

Mobiles become ‘your alter ego’

Schmidt said the super-fast built-in chips in modern phones and the ability to share number crunching with powerful servers in the online “cloud” meant “the phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter ego … it’s fundamental to everything that you do”.

He noted how Google phones could already perform voice recognition and translate spoken phrases into different languages, “so why can’t I just talk on the phone to someone who doesn’t speak my language?”

“It’s coming,” he said, before remarking on other powerful mobile apps such as one that can diagnose a user’s cough via the phone’s built-in microphone.

Google demonstrated the recently launched Google Goggles app, which lets mobile users take a photo of a building, landmark or other object and then perform a search on it through Google.

He said the company would soon extend this by offering “optical character recognition paired with real-time translation”. As an example, Google performed a scenario whereby the user can take a photo of an item on a German restaurant menu and have the text translated within seconds.

“It’s like magic – all of a sudden there are things that you can do that it never even occurred to you would be possible,” Schmidt said.

He said our mobile phones now know who we are, where we are and could recognise patterns in our behaviour, so an “interesting and maybe worrisome” next step was “applications that not only know where I am but predict where I’m going”.

In a dig at Apple, Schmidt unveiled Adobe Flash support for Google’s Android platform by demonstrating videos on The New York Times website. Apple was forced to modify its advertisements for the iPad that included the website following revelations that the ads showed Flash content, which isn’t supported by the iPad.

Schmidt predicted that in three years, if not sooner, smartphones would pass global PC sales – “a remarkable achievement”.

“Mobile web adoption is proceeding at eight times faster than the equivalent point 10 years ago for the desktop,” said Schmidt.

“Half the new internet connections are for mobile devices. From a Google perspective, there are more Google searches on mobile than on desktop in emerging countries like Indonesia.”

Google reducing telcos to ‘dump pipes’

During a question and answer session following the keynote, Schmidt was forced to defend Google against claims by telcos that the company was forcing them to become “dumb pipes” providing little more than bandwidth for Google’s appilcations.

It was claimed Google, with its network-intensive applications like YouTube, benefited from operators’ networks without contributing anything to building the network infrastructure.

At the same time, Google was increasingly competing with the telcos by releasing apps such as Google Voice, which allows users to bypass the networks to make voice calls. It also sells its Nexus One phone directly to consumers online, bypassing the mobile operators.

The company also announced recently that it was building an experimental fibre-to-the-home network in parts of the US that could potentially offer a blistering 1Gbps bandwidth.

By comparison, the upcoming National Broadband Network is predicted to offer about 100Mbps.

But in an invite-only round-table discussion after the event, Schmidt said Google was purely experimenting in an effort to see what was required to bring networks up to 1Gbps, which could pave the way for more exciting applications and convince telcos to upgrade their networks.

Schmidt said definitively that Google did not intend to compete with the telcos or to build infrastructure. He did not believe Google was a threat to the telcos and in fact said the opposite was true.

“We believe that a lot of the growth that is occurring in the operators is because of the growth of sophisticated applications,” Schmidt said.

“Operators want Google to build apps that will drive people to use [their] networks.”

[Article by Asher Moses]

Asher Moses travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Samsung.

Source: smh.com.au

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Using mobiles for just calls and texting is a thing of the past, as a third of Australians now check emails on their handsets and more than 70 per cent access mobile entertainment and information services.

In spite of the global financial crisis, the use of mobile phone services has continued to grow in the past year as more Australians buy internet-enabled smartphones, the 2009 Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index reveals.

Released today by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the exhaustive survey of 3710 respondents found 36 per cent used email on their mobiles in the past 12 months, and, of those, almost half used email daily – a growth rate of 80 per cent over the previous year.

In last year’s survey, just 7 per cent of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets, but this figure has jumped this year to 32 per cent, with half of those accessing the sites daily.

General web browsing is also on the rise, with 21 per cent of respondents visiting websites on their mobile phones at least once a day.

Half access information services such as news, weather and movie times on their mobiles at least once a month.

Half of Australians used or bought entertainment services on their mobiles at least once a month, with games, ringtones and music downloads the three most popular categories.

In an interview, the report’s author, Dr Marisa Maio Mackay, said the results showed Australia had moved well beyond the tipping point in the consumer usage of mobile services.

Accessing the web, video, music and information on mobile phones was now well and truly mainstream.

The survey showed mobile phone service use was now “a commodity as opposed to a luxury for many Australians”.

Mackay, the director of research at m.Net, said much of the growth in mobile phone services was due to the launch of the iPhone, which “raised the standards in terms of usability across all handsets”.

Of the respondents, 9 per cent owned an iPhone.

Nokia was again the most popular brand, with 47 per cent owning a Nokia phone.

Sony Ericsson was second on 12 per cent, Samsung was third with 11 per cent and Motorola dropped from second place to sixth place on 5 per cent.

Aside from the growth in smartphones, another factor that has led to a jump in mobile internet use is the growth in adoption of faster 3G phones.

More than 63 per cent of respondents stated they had a 3/3.5G handset, while 16 per cent didn’t know.

Mackay noted that more Australians appeared to be comfortable both with making payments from their mobile phones and with mobile phone advertising, which she predicted would lead to a surge in investment in content services over the next year.”

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iPhone might rule the smartphone sector for now, but market researchers predict that the dominance of Apple’s popular handset could be toppled by Google’s Android mobile platform within three years.

The global sales forecast published by Gartner predicts that in 2012, Android, Symbian (found mainly on Nokia phones) and Research In Motion (BlackBerry) will dominate the mobile operating system market, pushing Apple’s iPhone OS into fourth position with a 13.6 per cent slice of the market.

“The iPhone is all about user experience but Apple can only produce a small number of handsets and not everyone wants an iPhone handset. They will remain strong but they won’t take over world,” said Robin Simpson, a researcher at Gartner.

Android, on the other hand, is expected to lift its market share from 5.1 per cent to 18 per cent, moving ahead of RIM (13.9 per cent) to sit below Symbian, which will lose some of its 48.1 per cent stronghold by 2012 to claim 37.4 per cent of the market.

Like Apple and RIM, Google’s Android platform has a thriving marketplace of smartphone applications, which is becoming a key differentiator within the mobile market, but it is yet to establish a dominant presence here with only 2-3 per cent of the market and only three Android handsets now available.

These are the HTC Dream and Magic, and the Galaxy Icon from Samsung. However, the stable is set to grow with HTC’s new Hero handset due out this month and the Motorola Cliq is expected to ship before Christmas.

“Android has been around for less than a year and the user interface is not as fancy or sexy as iPhone, but we expect it to grow quickly with more and more hardware makers embracing it going forward,” Warren Chaisatien, research director at Telsyte, said.

“We’re excited to see just how far the platform has come in one year … Android is now on over 10 devices in 26 countries with 32 carriers, in 19 different languages. As more carriers and handset manufacturers turn to open platforms, we anticipate this growth will only continue,” a Google spokesperson said.

Growth in emerging markets is the key reason that Symbian and Android are likely to dominate the global market as handset makers there seek cheap, open platforms on which to develop products, Simpson said.

While Android has always been an open platform, Nokia has also opened up Symbian to third-party developers.

“There are dozens of Asian and Indian vendors that can address their markets with a cheap and cheerful operating system,” he said.

While there is consensus among researchers that Google’s Android is on the ascendancy, in other respects the Australian smartphone market is likely to defy global trends, Chaisatien said.

“We see three operating systems competing at the forefront in coming years. BlackBerry, which is already very strong in the business market, has done a great job in terms of repositioning themselves to consumers. In number two position, we see the Apple iPhone, which has made significant gains in the market in just one year, and in third place we see Google’s Android,” he said.

While they will not disappear any time soon, Symbian and Microsoft are considered most at threat from Android and iPhone, and Palm recently pulled out of the local market altogether, proving how difficult it is to survive in the cut-throat smartphone world.

“Once upon a time, Palm was very popular but it lost so much market share because it was not innovating quickly enough. It has pulled back to focus on markets where it has a strong presence,” Simpson said.

Source: smh.com.au

Louise Hearn, 15 October 2009