I don't jump often at first-generation technology for most things, so it's no surprise that I waited a while to get a smart phone. But in a sense I have waited for the first generation of what was termed a "superphone" in today's announcement of the Google Nexus One, a Google Android-based mobile device built by HTC and sold directly by Google from its own online store. The Nexus One goes toe-to-toe with Apple's iPhone in many ways but it also begins to challenge the content industry to consider what today's proliferation of mobile devices means for their marketing strategies.
Unlike the Apple iPhone, you can choose to order a Nexus One "unlocked" from Google's online store, meaning that you can get it without having to be locked into any telephone company's contract or service plan. You can then, if you choose, get the voice and data plan of your choice with a technology-compatible vendor (T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the US, and most non-U.S. carriers) or, if you choose, just use WiFi and to get connectivity to data and Voice over IP services on the Web.
I ordered the "unlocked" version of the phone within a few minutes of the online store going live, a bone-simple process. I noted on the order page that Verizon will offer "locked" access for this phone soon, marketed under the "Droid" moniker it uses currently for Motorola's Android phone offering on Verizon. For the time being I have decided to use the Nexus One as a "data only" phone, using VoIP when I am in WiFi hotspots. This may allow me to use it as a replacement for my desk phone, since it's always in range of my local WiFi (let's see what happens when Google announces its integration of Gizmo5 VoIP services for Google Voice). I think of it like having Skype in "walkabout" mode with a trendy earpiece that has Web access. Once the service plans for data-only access to phone company networks have improved a bit and I can suss out what to do with my last remaining copper phone line, I'll think about which U.S. telco vendor will be best to choose to fill in the gaps for WiFi service.
If you look at most coverage maps for mobile data access and the ability of emerging networks to support both voice and high-speed data more reliably on a single network connection, why would I do otherwise for an advanced phone? If voice is moving towards being a service on consumer data networks, as it is already in most major enterprises, and voice services such as Skype and Gizmo5 are providing increasingly reliable VoIP phone-like connectivity almost anywhere, then I wonder whether it makes sense to lock into any traditional voice services for a superphone. I'd rather use a simple mobile phone as a voice backup service for those hard-to-reach spots that Google Voice can ring as needed and go superphone for voice on a good data-only network for the rest.
As voice becomes more integrated with Web applications and content services, the need for their integration is going to become more obvious fairly rapidly. One of the demos at the Nexus One press briefing was of dictating text messages and emails. It wasn't a particularly spectacular demo, and I am sure that less carefully tested examples may fare worse, but going to and from voice and text as a standard interface is more likely to make the combination of voice and data an essential factor in information services in the next few years. Since the Nexus One is pretty well positioned for the most advanced high-speed data networks rolling out over the next couple of years, I think that I am covered on that front for now.
As for the phone itself, I hate to say it, but technology changes so quickly these days that it's almost unimportant beyond a certain point whether it's a perfectly awesome phone or not. You can look at the Engadget review and judge for yourself, but overall it's as good as an iPhone but without two-finger touch software (which will come soon enough, since the hardware handles it, apparently) though trumping the current iPhone with a screaming 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Most importantly, though, it's built on an open platform developed by a company that believes in the Web as the real unifier of content services, not proprietary networks or platforms. With all of the tablets, readers and other gizmos coming out this year that will try to pretend that the Web isn't very important, it will be nice to have a mobile device that puts the Web experience for content first, with some neat-o applications in a spiffy, sleek package to boot. That'll do. For now.
There was some scuttlebutt buzzing around last week's duel between the Google I/O developer's conference and the All Things D conference to the effect that perhaps Google had some intelligence about the Ballmer announcement of the Bing-flavored preview of Microsoft's new Live Search search engine that prompted their announcement of their Wave messaging and collaboration technology. Somehow that doesn't ring true, given the breadth of the Google Wave announcement, which is a pretty encompassing technology initiative. By contrast, Ballmer didn't have anything nearly as broad to offer the ATD crowd, but at least he had something to put up against I/O to keep people buzzing about Microsoft, most of which was catch-up to counter announcement's at Google's earlier Searchology event.
If you can find any significant differences between Bing and the earlier Kumo-labeled version of Microsoft's Live Search preview, you have sharper eyes than I do. That's not necessarily a bad thing; there's a lot to be said for Microsoft's leveraging of their new Powerset technology that helps to dress up search engine results with related content and faceted navigation features. But in several forays into Bing searches, I cannot say that I am finding all that many melds of information that are truly impressive. Yes, it's nice to be able to to have comparison shopping data, reviews and related links embedded in searches such as "Samsung LCD TVs," but that's not so different than, say, a search on Google for "JFK to SFO" with the "related searches" option turned on that has comparison flight shopping tools in the search results. Bing is good, perhaps even state-of-the-art, but hardly a game-changer for the state of search in general.
What the maturing Bing search results do seem to indicate is that the lines between destination sites and search engines will continue to blur as content providers and search engines both go in search of more valuable and engaging contexts for high-quality content. For search engine providers, being able to increase engagement time on a given page of search results is good for ad revenues and overall user satisfaction and brand value. For online publishers, the melded results offered in Bing, Google's Universal Search and other evolving search portals represent opportunities to engage audiences at the point of demand with solutions that enhance their own brand value while building revenues from advertising alliances with search engine portals. You might say, even, that the Bing/Google Universal Search approach is like dialing up a custom magazine/shopping guide/newspaper, with increasingly slick and well-organized content that begins to mimic the editorial capabilities of traditional specialty publications.
The parallel between traditional media and on-demand publications assembled by search engines is underscored in Bing by the rich and engaging photographs that appear on the home page of the Bing site. Squint a little bit and you can imagine the cover of a National Geographic magazine or other glossy high-quality publications. The visual promise of Bing's home page is that what you're about to experience is really, really good at a visceral level. The guts of this "magazine" don't yet match the cover, but you can tell that over time both Bing and other search engines are headed in the direction of getting search results to be as engaging and visually rewarding as traditional magazine publications, albeit with lots of the Web-savvy functionality that keeps people coming back.
With these evolutions in mind, publishers need to be prepared to make their content brands resonate in the online pages of whatever on-demand context appeals to their audiences - including increasingly sophisticated search engines that are aiming to keep people hanging around their pages as long as possible. Initiatives such as Journalism Online will help to make search engines more profitable aggregation venues for traditional publishers, but they need to be ready to accept more willingly the idea that search engines can be great publishing partners that help them to get their content to their audiences in the contexts that they value most. Certainly Bing will help to convince some publishers of this, but it's still early days for publishers recognizing that The New Aggregation is not a mere thought piece but instead a key component in the future of profitable publishing.
