So Google officially announced their Nexus One today.
Does this mean that now everyone is going to be going gaga over the brand new world where everything is mobile and beautiful?
Will the sun be all rosy colored when we get up in the morning?
Not likely.
There is no brave new world of mobile computing for all that will come raining down on us. No smartphone, or superphone is going to bring real mobile innovation to the masses no matter how much we might want to wish it so.
The reason: wireless broadband providers.
As I said on Twitter
The fact is that as long as shareholders and investors are more important than consumers we will continue to get raped by the providers and true innovation will only be a pipedream.
The Telcos have invested heavily in technologies such as VOIP and faster data networks and have brought down their costs of operations tremendously, yet the cost of mobile plans hasn’t gone down, it continues to rise.
The Telcos have the government on their side, it is a regulated industry, and one that brings in huge amounts of money to state and federal government agencies — take a look at your monthly bill and see the dozen or more taxes and other fees. This relationship between government agencies and the Telcos helps keep out competition and keep monthly fees high.
Yet wireless data communications lies at the heart of many innovative products and services being developed by Silicon Valley companies.
The Telcos are holding back innovation because they control who is allowed to offer applications and services. They regularly block innovative features within cell phones. And high cost of their monthly plans has created a digital divide far greater than the one on the desktop.
You can release a new superphone or iPhone everyday of the week but in the end it’s all just a bullshit game with the only winners being the wireless broadband providers.
And we keep asking them to pass the Vaseline.
I love it! Finally some one who doesn’t praise the smart phone Gods, every day I hear more about how mobile web is the future. Guess what? I have the web on my laptop, it is mobile, and it is less expensive and far superior to any smart phone. Mobile web, even in all it’s present glory, is crap (I just had my $100 a month plan stopped). By the time smart phones are producing a realistic internet experience, the web will have evolved for it, not the other way around. You just can’t make a 1.5″ LCD work like a 15″, or even 8″ for that matter. And for some reason, textual downloads do not even approach the speeds of regular broadband service.