Can Google Voice transform our cell phone industry?

Unlimited calling across Canada

What does Google Voice mean to Canadians? Quite simply the possibility of unlimited calling! Google Voice is a telecommunications service based on Personal numbering, which means that the service is independent of your cell phone, home phone or instrument and attached to you, hence personal.  This means that you finally have a form of unlimited calling on your cell phone regardless of which cell phone company or carrier you use.  This is the same sort of service that Wind Mobile is trying to achieve with its unlimited calling plans. Unfortunately Google Voice is only available in the US, although I have heard about a work around that can get it working in Canada, read on.

Restrictions by Cell phone companies a possibility

With Canada as the third most expense country to use cell phones…. in the world – this will be a welcome reprieve for all Canadians. My main concern however, is that I simply doubt whether a 20 billion industry will sit back and remain idle while Google impact their margins. In fact, I believe there will be some form of restriction placed on cell phones in Canada by the cell phone companies themselves. I certainly hope not! Rather I would hope that this too will signal the need to be more creative with their plans for everyone concerned. Should I hold my breath?

The end of wireless number portability?

Google Voice would allow Canadians to be detached from their device. If you’ve ever been caught in the nightmare of transferring your number from one cell phone to another at a different company then you will understand that the need to go through this process is reduced significantly as you would still have your Google voice 1 number. This will allow consumers to switch between carriers without needing to keep their old number because they can login to their Google voice service and redirect calls to the new number.

Lower bills due to calling and features swap

There is an impressive array of features available by Google Voice including:

• One Personal number: one phone number that rings all or a select group of your phones
• Free SMS: It’s all online so it free:, sending and receiving
• Block calls: send your bosses number, I mean select callers straight to voicemail
• Conference calling: join several people into a single call
• Google voicemail: voicemail like email
• Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
• Custom greetings: nothing new but you can have different voicemail greetings by caller
• Low cost calls: unlimited calls in north American and low cost International calling
• Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS

Given this impressive array of features, why do I need to pay for these same features on my existing cell phone, can someone say lower bills!

Getting Google Voice to work in Canada

In order to get Google Voice to work in Canada, you must have an invitation from Google to use the service as they are in trial right now. With your Google Voice invite – one method I’ve heard about (I haven’t tried this so let me know if this works) is to get a magic jack to circumvent the US number restriction. So essentially:

• You need to acquire and install a MagicJack with a US phone number
• With your US phone number you can activate your Google Voice service and choose a personal number
• The final step is to forward your MagicJack to your Canadian Cell phone and you are good to go.

The one caveat is that Canadians may have some reservation with using an online based telecommunications service not sanctioned by their cell phone company. And given the experience some customers have had with VoIP services in the past they may be some hesitation to jump on board. But that remains to be seen. My expectation is that Google Voice will come to Canada at the end of 2010 or early in 2011.

Cell Phone Batteries Lasting Till the End of a Contract?

To all of our benefit, battery manufacturers have made a significant improvement over the years on the life of our cell phone batteries. Many of us can not live without our phones; I have mine glued to me at all times. One of the greatest challenges for cell phone batteries is their limited life span. Can a cell phone battery actually make it to the end of a three year contract?

There are several types of batteries that are found in cell phones, two of the most common are nickel metal hydride and lithium ion. Older cell phones used nickel cadmium batteries which had a memory, meaning the phone will only charge to a certain level, no matter how long it stays on the charger. The solution to this is to fully discharge the battery and then fully charge it again, very time consuming. Most cell phone batteries are made to be recharged about 300 to 500 times, depending on a number of factors such as temperature, length of charge; keeping your phone on the charger after it is fully charged is actually lowering the life of the battery, bad reception; the phone has to work harder to look for a signal; putting more drain on the battery, and the speed at which the phone is charged; a slower charge is better for the battery. One other thing to consider, if you are using a digital phone, is whether or not you are actually in a digital or analog service. If your phone is in an analog service area, you will find that the battery has a significant drain as the phone has to work harder to translate the signal.

I have had several phones that did not make it past two years, very bad when you are on a three year contract! Another thing to consider is the popularity of smart phones; they are more like mini laptops needing more and more energy. The problem with a lot of these smart phones is that it is nearly impossible to replace the battery on your own once the battery needs replacement.

Batteries have come a long way since the first analog cell phones first started getting popular in the 1990’s.  Our talk times have gone from 30 minutes with standby times of 24 hours to talk times of at least two hours, with standby times of seven days or more. Clearly we are moving in the right direction.

Take care of your batteries and you may find that they will last as long as your contract, hopefully.

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LOL, L2G, LMAO, MTF, ADN, CUL…  A new language is emerging. There are over 1000 different text messaging  abbreviations out there. Many of these are used by different groups of people with all sorts of  hobbies and interests. The average texter only uses about 20 of the most common ones such as LOL (laugh out loud), TTYL (talk to you later), and BTW (by the way). Not only is this a faster way to communicate with each other; it saves money! If you are not on an unlimited text plan, typing out every word you are trying to say would cost you a small fortune every month. Text messaging is becoming the norm. The introduction of the Smartphone, has made texting easier with large screens and well laid out keyboards. Everywhere you turn, there are people walking around looking down at their devices and typing 50 words a minute with two fingers. You hardly see anyone actually speaking to one another on their phones, its as if they are secret agents, retrieving classified information. Maybe the next mobile device will only let you text…. wait a minute that came out years ago, it was called a pager.

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Netbooks. The future or the past?

Many recent articles have cited the increase in Netbook sales as one of the most interesting stories of 2009. The surge in sales and the quick popularity has changed the computing landscape.  This is exactly the reason why many US cellular companies have decided to get on side and bundle their offerings. “Thank you for calling, would you like a Netbook with that”? But how about the Canadian marketplace? Will we follow suit.Not likely in Canada.  However, the US marketplace have started to see the lines cross. Computer manufacturers and cell phone companies alike are starting to jostle for position. Will Dell be manufacturing laptops or smart phones?  One thing is for sure, once smart phones have the ability to plug into a big screen and even play HD content via a High Definition Media Interface (HDMI) port, this will be big news for consumers and further accelerate the adoption of smart phones as laptop replacements. Let’s face it, the biggest hurdle with smart phones for power PC users is the size of the screen and therefore the ability to be highly productive while on the move.

So to answer the question posed, with a Bluetooth keyboard and HDMI port standard the line between Netbooks and smart phones will be non-existent as we pack more and more technology into smaller devices.

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With the debut of the Android based T-Mobile G1 in October 2008, and the coming of the “revolutionary” devices HTC dream and HTC Magic to be launched on June 2, and with a possible 18 more devices before year end, there is a sense that Google is setting to dominate the Smartphone OS (operating system) space.  Can Google dominate the Smartphone market the way Microsoft dominates in the PC market?

Google is certainly taking steps to be a dominant player in the market.  While Microsoft was allowed to license its OS to OEMS during the PC boom and established its dominance in the market place, Google is trying a more “open” approach with its open Android platform. Google allows device manufactures to “license” its OS free with three options:

• Option 1: Device manufactures can download the OS for free and use it with no strings attached, except that they are restricted from loading Gmail or Google’s calendar
• Option 2: Same as above except the manufactures agree to a distribution agreement to include Google applications including Gmail and Google’s calendar among others.
• Option 3: To get the full “Google Experience”, including the company’s logo and applications, the device manufactures must agree not to censor or limit any application or program regardless of its “taste” and likelihood to offend.

The difference between Google’s approach and Microsoft is that Google is not in the software business and does not care about software sales – they are in the advertising business. So Google can afford to be open, free and literally give its OS away to device manufactures willing to form a partnership. And the incentives are certainly there, with a free OS, the overall cost of the device drops while opening the user to a wide range of applications and already existing Google apps. The drawback of course it that the user experience may be plagued with poorly developed applications and bugs, given how open the whole process is.
But Android is trying to do what Microsoft has failed to do, become the dominant OS for mobile devices.  According to Gardner Research,  Symbian (Nokia’s OS) led the mobile OS market in 2008 with 52%, down however from a 64% market share a year earlier. RIM’s OS is second at 17% market share gaining 7% in a year; Microsoft is third with 12% market share, flat from 2007. The upstart is the Mac OS X which gain 6% market share in less than a year and now stands at 8% of the worldwide market.

Source: Gardner Research, March 2009

What the table above indicates is that the OS market is very fragmented, and while Nokia’s Symbian OS has the largest market share, RIM and Apple are formidable players and at current pace will pass Symbian to be the leading players in this market.  None of these players are likely to adopt Google’s Android OS as their own.  Leaving a rather small number of device manufactures to go after.  In additions the conditions in the mobile OS space are a lot different than the winner take all nature of the PC market – there are no network effects, no real lock ins, no major learning curve and there seems to be little incentive at least now for the big manufactures like Nokia, RIM and Apple to go the Google Android route.

The only real way for Android to be a game changer is for customers to demands its OS – for that to happen Android has to be significantly better than its competitors, and from the support that iPhone’s MAC OS X has received, the “crackberry” nature of the RIM blackberry devices, its highly unlikely customers will mass migrate and demand Android. But may be time will tell.

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