By now you’ve probably heard that 2010 is going to be the year of the rise of the smartphones. “No wait, I thought 2010 was meant to be the year of 3D TV?” you exclaim (at least if you’ve read Part 1). Ah but you see…2010 is going to be an incredible year, the year 3D TV hits the market and the year that the smartphones rise up! Or so the techno-prophets say.

First off, just what is a smartphone? Definitions vary between a mobile phone that has a keyboard and can access your e-mail, to a phone that runs a complete operating system with a standard framework and user-interface that allows the use and development of applications. A smartphone is for all intents and purposes, essentially a miniature computer with phone capabilities, or to put it another way a phone aspiring to be a computer. That a smartphone has the capabilitiy to access the internet goes without saying nowadays, though two years ago this may not have been the case. And as phones get smarter, the internet  become more and more important in order for them to operate – just look at the iPhone with its many online applications (or ‘apps’), not to mention its online App Store.

Smartphones are set to outnumber normal computers by 2011 according to PC World, which also means that in theory more people will be accessing the internet via their phones than by computer. And according to a more recent statistic from Infonetics Research smartphones are going to overtake the sale of regular phones by 2012. This statistic came just 15 days before Telecom Trends International released data suggesting that in fact it wouldn’t be until 2015 that smartphones manage to overtake the regular phones. Regardless of whether you choose to believe the research of Infonetics as the Telegraph did or that of Telecom Trends International, both sets of statistics are a strong indication that by the end of the decade smartphones will certainly have overtaken today’s most common mobile phones.

Google recently broke into the smartphone market with its Nexus One. Far be it from the iPhone killer that many speculated it would be, the Nexus One still rivals the iPhone with a similarly user-friendly system, it’s own app framework and a host of hardware advantages. It also includes what Google is claiming is a new speech-to-text feature that actually works – speech-to-text technology has been in development for many years now, but has yet to impress. And if Google has finally developed proper speech-to-text technology it’s sure to be integrated into many other technologies. Won’t the Nexus One defeat the iPhone?

Well…it seeks to replicate rather than innovate so it’s certainly no iPhone assassin, but it just might overtake it – the Nexus One is new, very shiny and incredibly hyped up, while the iphone is beginning to lose it’s new-look sheen. Google is a brand that, like Apple, inspires the sort of loyal consumer fanbase that sometimes borders on the fanatical and this, Google’s first officially branded piece of hardware, is sure to be a big hit with many. Further, all those self-proclaimed iPhone-haters out there who secretly want an iphone but don’t want to admit it will love it. True, there are already many smartphones out there running Android (Google’s mobile operating system) which match up to both the iPhone and the Nexus One, and let’s not forget the Blackberry range, but at the end of the day it’s the Google branding that really makes the Nexus One stand out. Whether this and the hype it brings with it is enough to slay the iPhone is doubtful, but it will almost certainly become a close rival. 

So is the Nexus One a superphone as Google claimed then? As Google themselves invented the term ‘superphone’ it’s a safe bet to think it is. But as Google also clearly stated that the Nexus One is part of an emerging range of ‘superphones’. If the term catches on, one would imagine that the iPhone, the Blackberry and many other high-end smartphones are among this new group of superphones.

Much more interesting though than the Nexus One itself are the economics at work behind it. Google simultaneously launched it’s Google Store, an online shop very similar to the iTunes Store, currently selling eco-friendly merchandise and gadgets for Google and Youtube…and the Nexus One of course. Google promises to fill it with new and innovative products for us, but has releaed no further information. Can the Google Store do for Google what the iTunes Store did for Apple? Whereas Apple offers complete software-hardware packages to it’s customers, Google is all about selling cheap software to hardware manufacturers. Apple is often incompatible with other platforms, while Google an be found almost anywhere – Google Maps and Youtube, for instance, are two basic apps you’ll find on every iPhone. It’s two hugely different business strategies entering into direct competition with each other and it will be fascinating to see how this plays out over the next few years.

As John Gapper of the Financial Times pointed out last Thursday, we may yet see a repeat of Microsoft’s 1980s desktop computing victory over Apple, but with Google in the shoes of Microsoft and with smartphones in the place of the computers. Google, as Microsoft did with it’s computer operating-system, is beginning to inundate the smartphone market  with it’s mobile operating-system Android, even though it’s only given out its official branding to the Nexus One (and so in a convoluted manner entered into competition with itself!). Is this part of a Microsoft style plan to outdo Apple’s slice of the mobile market by standardising the market and making smartphone technology cheaper and accessible to all? 

An alternative view is that Google wants to ‘liberate’ the mobile internet. Remember the huge hype about preserving Net Neutrality? Well the debate is still raging. The principle behind it is that there is a real danger that internet providers would start restricting what sites you could access over the internet, allowing you to only visit more websites in return for additional payments. It’s been an issue since about 2000 and the American Congress finally agreed to look into proposed Net Neutrality legislation last October. The European Union looks likely to also adopt Net Neutrality. Back to Google: Google has always been a strong advocate of Net Neutrality and small wonder as while the ‘net remains neutral, they remain largely in control. Could it be that by distributing Android to many phone companies Google wants to break the ‘non-neutral’ internet-access stranglehold that phone companies have established with smartphones?  Many companies offering smartphones have restricted internet services, enabling you to access twitter and skype for instance but not allowing you to surf the rest of the web. This is primarily a problem in the US, though recently the UK and parts of Europe has also entered into this dilemna. If Google can gain a strong foothold in the market, it will be able to force unrestricted internet access out across the smartphone spectrum. And for Google that’s a very good thing, because when the internet is unrestricted Google’s original search engine remains king and the company rakes in the advertising revenue.

But whatever its ulterior motives, Google as usual gives nothing away. This decade has already seen the baby-steps of Google’s major move itno the mobile industry and soon, with the release of the Google Chrome OS, we’ll see Google break brave new ground into the realm of cloud-computing. But that’s all in Part 3 of The Future Is Shiny: Virtually Cloudy…coming soon!