Full Of Google Goodness
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
A couple of years ago who would have thought that brands such as Apple and Google would end up playing in the mobile phone space? If you had said to your friends then that you might be carrying around an Apple (or Google branded) phone they would probably have laughed.
Anyway, those who followed our Twitter over last week’s long bank holiday weekend will know that we are all now proud (and very excited) owners of HTC Magic Google branded, Android powered phones courtesy of Vodafone.
A few years ago Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola etc. (and even way before that when Sony and Ericsson were separate businesses) these companies had the phone market to themselves (and although the Apple and Google phone shipments are actually quite insignificant in the total scheme of things) the ‘old’ industry has had to look on in horror as these new upstarts seem to win hands down in getting a lot of the attention.
In our own business we have long debated the merits of different phones. Getting a company standard was important but we could never agree on Blackberry vs Apple vs Google vs A.N Other.
Whilst we are Apple fans big time elsewhere in our lives (and in business) the iPhone just never cut it for us as a useful business tool. Blackberry’s are great for email but not best for web access and a lot of the work that we do is not surprisingly WordPress based.
We held off getting hold of the first generation of Google phones – mainly because we didn’t like the style of the handsets (not the best reason but important to us nonetheless) but the new HTC Magic phones both look and feel good.
We have had the new phones for a week now and have been very happy. There are a few niggles – one of which caused me to lose my 6 digit security pin when trying to do my business telephone banking but on the whole we have been very pleased – our R&D folks have been playing with the phone’s camcorder feature and the instant YouTube upload facility which we have now almost integrated (automatically) into our blog – a very useful tool for our intrepid reporters!!
Anyhow, we know of a couple of very useful Android OOH applications in the works at the moment so watch this space!
May 13th, 2009 at 17:35 @774
It’s interesting that you say iPhone isn’t ready for business, purely because our company has recently renewed mobile contracts and has decided on iPhones for everyone. The integration possibilities and productivity gains we can make are the main reasons for the adoption I believe. Also looking forward to some improvements in the upcoming 3.0 software.