Google 'ready to take on Apple iPhone next year'

Google's share price last week broke through the $600 (£300) ceiling and looks set to rise even higher, with a strong set of results expected this week and the company poised to enter lucrative new markets.

Not content with dominating the internet, the search giant is now believed to be planning to take the mobile communications market by storm. Analysts at Lehman Brothers predict that when it unveils its third-quarter results on Thursday, Google's revenues will rise 8.6 per cent quarter-on-quarter to $2.98bn with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) of $1.8bn. For the full year 2007, Lehman predicts a 58 per cent year-on-year increase in turnover to $11.56bn with Ebitda of $7.03bn, representing a year-on-year rise of over 52 per cent. The investment bank has raised its target price for Google shares to $714.

Lehman analyst Douglas Anmuth believes that Google will launch a mobile phone in February next year that will be similar to the recently launched Apple iPhone in that it will have "an oversized screen perhaps around 3in diagonal and with touch display" plus WiFi capability. Google's main differentiator will be on price – its phone is expected to sell at a fraction of the $400 iPhone.

According to Mr Anmuth, the device will be a simple "plain vanilla" smartphone that can be manufactured for $120-$160. But he adds: "We believe a Google phone could be marketed at a price point below $100, and potentially even be free."

The incentive for Google to offer a free phone is the online advertising revenue the company could generate with an internet-enabled mobile device. Lehman Brothers also thinks it probable that Google will follow in Apple's steps by adopting a revenue-sharing model with the carriers, and predicts that Orange will be the most likely mobile operator partner for Google in Europe.

In the US, Lehman sees Sprint and T-Mobile as more suitable partners than AT&T and Verizon. It is thought Google might bid for a slice of the spectrum in the US next year. The Taiwan-based HTC is believed to have already built a prototype mobile phone for Google.

According to Lehman, Google is building a Linux-based mobile operating system which is likely to include Google applications such as a search facility, maps, Gmail, Google Talk and Calendar.

But not all analysts agree that Google is committed to making its own mobile phone handsets. US-based investment bank Piper Jaffray says: "Google is likely developing a mobile operating system, but it is unlikely that it will begin manufacturing phone hardware."

According to Piper Jaffray, Google's mobile phone operating system will compete directly with Microsoft's Windows Mobile system, and could be unveiled before the end of this month.

Google has been making acquisitions that point to a mobile phone strategy. In 2005, it acquired Android, a software development company specialising in mobile operating systems that highlight the location of the user.

But Google still has a challenge ahead in the internet video space, where it is currently facing considerable criticism from the advertising industry concerning some of the content being displayed on the YouTube social networking website. According to Marketing magazine, some of the UK's biggest digital planning and buying specialists have rounded on Google's plans to charge for ads on the site.

Advertisers are reported to be wary of placing their brands against content that may include clips from criminal gangs or other unsavoury sources. A Google spokesman said the company is responding to concerns by allowing users to flag content they feel may be inappropriate.
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Intel's shows its iPhone clone

After famously winning Apple's computer business, Intel appears to have its sights set on providing the powerplant for the iPhone and its descendants.
During this morning's session on mobile Internet devices, Intel's senior veep for ultra mobility Anand Chandrasekher produced a prototype device which looked like a stretch limo version of the iPhone which he spruiked as "mostly all screen, you can read it very nicely; it's very slim, very thin."
"I love the iPhone" admitted Chandrasekher. "Apple is a bastion of innovation in their own right, and we are an innovator in our own right. Hopefully sometime in the future our paths may meet".
The slim silver non-iPhone was based on the Moorestown platform, which is the successor to the Menlow UMPC platform (built around the Silverthorne CPU) due in mid-2008. While Chandrasekher played coy with specific details on Moorestown, he said the goal was a 10x reduction in power usage by the time the system shipped in 2009-2010. A slide on Moorestown indicated it would be a ‘system on a chip' which included a 45nm core, graphics and memory controller on a single die - all of which would meet his promise that Moorestown would halve the size and power consumption of mobile Internet devices.

Multicore is also part of the MID's future, says Chandrasekher. "The Internet is not going any less complex" he said, harking back to Intel's mantra of the Internet - and especially social networking, which he claimed is responsible for 25% of traffic on the Internet today - being the driver for ultra-mobile devices.

"The Internet is only getting more complex, more dynamic. And as it moves to a handheld environment it will demand more performance. We're not short on performance today, we are actually delivering what is needed over the next several years. It's a matter of balancing power, cost and performance. When all of those hit the sweet zone, of course we'll offer multi-core."

In addition to heavily spruiking the benefits of Intel's IA silicon architecture over the ARM chips that dominate the mobile market (including the iPhone, which runs a Samsung ARM processor), this morning's presentation noticeably relegated Microsoft to a single token PowerPoint slide whereas key executives from Canonical and Adobe both got a walk-on spot to spin their ultra-mobile wares.
Live demonstrations featured a Compal device unit with WiMAX running Canonical's Ubuntu for Mobile Internet Devices distro, and an Asus UMPC running a beta of Adobe Media Player, which uses Adobe's AIR offline run-time environment to play music and video offered through online ‘channels'.

David Flynn is attending IDF San Francisco 2007 as a guest of Intel Australia
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The iPhone, Steve Jobs and an army of blind hackers

Posted by Chris Soghoian
With Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers, the question that must be asked is how will Apple try to defeat the hackers: Frequent and disruptive software updates, or lawsuits? Will Apple risk losing its most frequently (ab)used legal tool, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to try to punish the developers of the iPhone unlocking tools?

The wait is over. After being teased over the past few weeks with rumors that Apple would turn a blind eye to iPhone hacking or *gasp* even encourage it, the news is in and it ain't good for the hackers.

At the official U.K. launch of the iPhone Tuesday, CEO Steve Jobs made it clear that Apple will fight attempts to use the popular device on unauthorized networks. "It's a cat-and-mouse game," said Jobs. "We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it's our job to stop them breaking in."


anySIM iPhone unlocker
(Credit: iPhone Dev Team/Hackintosh)

For the loose-knit community of iPhone developers, the last few months have been an around-the-clock hacking session. As a result, programmers have released a plethora of applications. Some, including an instant-messaging tool, a general purpose application installer and even a Nintendo game emulator, can be seen simply as developers releasing applications that Apple just didn't get around to writing itself. Other hacks, such as the much hyped iPhone Dev Team's anySIM unlocking tool, or the numerous free-ringtone tutorials that have been floating around the Net, can be more accurately described as a developer-lead attack upon Apple's revenue streams.
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