We would expect Google to announce this soon, wouldn’t we?
Well, it was not announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Instead, another giant, Nokia, communicated that it would embed Skype in its N-Series phone, including the upcoming N97.
The 2009 edition of this conference was a tremendous demonstration of the importance of mobile in today’s technology business.
Virtually all players are now becoming mobile:
- from Asus launching the Nuvifone with Garmin
- …Acer launching its own smartphone to
- …Wayfinder being acquired by Vodafone
- to ZTE and Huawei announcing their own LTE-compliant systems
Only two major players were in everybody’s mind but nowhere to see. Apple and Google. Maybe because they are the only 2 companies who do not have customers! Apple has… fans and Google has… well… advertisers.
For example, Apple was not part of the group of operators and device manufacturers who announced with GSMA the launch of a Universal Charging Solution (3 Group, AT&T, KTF, LG, mobilkom austria, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, T-Mobile and Vodafone).
Obviously, Apple was very much present thanks to all imitations of its iPhone UI!
And Google, which had a “representation office” was showing its muscles via the Android OS on 2 HTC phones and the Latitude service, launched in 27 countries.
Generally speaking, the show was in a way a demonstration of the renewed trust of the mobile operator community, which achieved the historical breakthrough of a worldwide agreement around the LTE standard. Also interesting was the announcement of the RCS (Rich Communication Suite) initiative (See below).
At the same time, mobile operators know that my subject title “Google launches free mobile service” could become true.
Of course, Google announcing this would be slightly more important than “Blyk launches free mobile service”. Google has shown with Google Maps that they could completely shortcut the operator middleman to obtain the user’s location information. They are showing it again with Latitude. Google will hold the live location and presence information of its users (in addition to their social graphs).
So it will probably become Latitude against RCS. However, RCS does not include location as part of its “rich communication”. This is probably the next step?
So far, mobile operators have been – very – shy about location. They may want to change their mind… fast.
