gPhone, Yet Again Google Plans Wireless

ThirdPipe has been saying for quite a while that Google was going to be a player in the cellular market. Excerpt:

Google, meanwhile, is expected to come out with a new operating system for mobile devices called gPhone to extend its hugely profitable search-and-ads business to the wireless market. As part of this effort, Google is expected to release a software kit to spur development of innovative third-party services and applications that would help lure consumers to gPhone-based handsets [BusinessWeek, 9/6/07].

One expected feature of the gPhone platform, dubbed gPay, would simplify commerce for third-party providers by enabling users to pay for their services via short text messages. Today, carriers force most transactions to flow through a subscriber’s monthly bill, keeping up to half the revenue for serving this role as an unwanted intermediary between developers and consumers. Were Google to introduce an alternative billing system that charges developers lower fees, “we could really flourish,” says mSpot’s Tsui.

Google may also remove obstacles and financial burdens that typically confront developers by offering an alternative wireless network where the selection of applications available to users isn’t tightly controlled by mobile carriers. Google has said it may bid for wireless spectrum licenses in early 2008 to build, possibly with a partner, a new mobile network with no restrictions on what applications customers can use.

Google will transform a good portion of the CPE market. Any maker who does not have a stable of phones that can be supported/enhanced by third party developers will be left in the dust of a rapidly changing marketplace.

Linky.