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Unlike Apple’s iPhone, the Gphone or Google phone is not really a physical phone, but an attempt by Google to create a world where everyone is always within arms reach of being able to access Google’s products and services. Consider the following situation. You are having dinner at a restaurant, and decide to go see a movie after you finish eating. You then pull out your cell phone, push a button to activate the voice recognition software, and speak “find nearby movie theaters”. Your phone then determines your physical location, and up pops a map of nearby movie theaters. You touch the icon for the nearest theater, up pops the movies that are playing, their showtimes, and a 20% off coupon if you reserve your seats by touching the coupon icon. You are about to make the reservation, but off to the side you notice two advertisements for movie downloads. You touch the first one and up pops a 50% off offer from Netflix. You touch the second one and up pops an advertisement from Google Video for a movie that it is showcasing on its sight. Since the Google movie is free, you decide to go home to watch the latest movie release from Google. The Gphones that come out later this year probably won’t have this level of sophistication. For a look at what the early Gphones will be like check out the video below.

Voice recognition software for Gphones will probably be available for download sometime in 2009. Their level of sophistication remains to be seen. Voice synthesis software will very likely be available for download sometime in the not to distant future.

These types of applications are potentially very lucrative for Google. When the icon for the movie theater was touched on Google maps, Google was providing the theater with free advertising - they didn’t make any money. When the icon for the Netflix offer was touched, Netflix paid Google an advertising fee. And when the icon for the Google advertisement was touched, Google obviously did not make any money, but when you went home to watch the Google video, you were exposed to more advertisements; and if you checked out any of these then Google made some more money. Google, whom many would say is on a quest for world domination, sees this as a must win market.

For situations like the above to become commonplace occurrences, smartphones need to be transformed into computer-phones, and the telecoms must agree to provide the computer-phones unfettered open access to their networks. The open access issue, which will most likely be the topic of a future rant, opens up a Pandora’s Box that includes such issues as net neutrality, who controls the Internet, and other related issues for paranoids. As for the computer-phone, it’s well on its way to becoming a reality. Google’s contribution here is the Gphone - which is not a piece of hardware but a collection of software designed for the upcoming generation of mobile devices. Their main product is called Android. Android is a Linux distribution designed specifically around the hardware limitations of mobile devices. At the core of Android is the Linux 2.6 kernel. Sitting on top of the Linux kernel is support for such items as databases, graphics, debugging, performance profiling, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, MPEG4, mp3, jpg, and GIF. In addition Android supports a virtual machine environment for running user applications written in Java. The virtual machine environment allows for an extra layer of protection against user applications that have gone rogue. The down side is that a virtual machine running Java code is very inefficient and places a heavy burden on a computer that will most likely be underpowered. To encourage software developers to come up with novel and exciting uses for the Gphone, Google has announced the “Android Developer Challenge “, which is planning on giving out some serious money. If you want to try your hand at developing Android software, the place to start is at the Android SDK .

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