Lots of noise recently about Google and Orange hooking up. I'd heard rumours of this (without anything solid actually being talked about), but a lot of the hype sounds iffy to me (and in my experience the Observer tend to be a bit grotty when it comes to sensibly covering technology issues).

"Google are software experts and are doing some amazing work compressing data so that the mobile user gets a much better experience" eh? They have some bright folks, no doubt, but compression doesn't necessarily equate to a better user experience (didn't Pogo make some amazing claims in this area yonks back?), and I've not seen fantastic user experiences characterise Google's mobile offerings so far.

Location-based searches are inevitable dredged up as the strength of Google (despite LBS failing to get much real traction so far), but launching a handset just to enable these seems a pretty extreme way of getting them out there - particularly when they're likely to rely on location data shared by network operator. That is, until GPS kit is cheap enough to stick into every handset - and I've personally been shocked this year to discover just how cheap a Bluetooth GPS unit is.

My money would be on a mobilisation of AdSense, particularly at a time when we're starting to see others hint about new ad models for mobile that may impact on operators.

Comments

[Michael Molin]

Hello Tom,

I've just published a relating post on the MEX blog due the link in your article.

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=145

Regards,

[Michael Molin]

I think this part of that post is directly relating to the theme of your article:

"Providing a mobile advertising model that *complements* the user experience is one of the main goals of my project of the cell computer. For example, search results are displayed on the main display and the context-sensitive text advertisiments are on the second display - the advertisements are at the fingertips of consumers. A user selects the ads and the separate corresponding pages are displayed in the document window - main display. In addition, a site map of a search system is displayed on the second display after the advertisements."

Regards,