Google Universe ( Fastflip, Android, Navigation, Goggles & Gphone)

Google is a company on the move. At any point of time they have loads of products cooking in their labs.Many of them do not see the light of the day, or are pushed behind to allow a newer idea to emerge. Google Wave was a surprising product in that regard. Though it is too early to say whether it will succeed or not, but the euphoria and hype associated with the product is beginning to quieten down.Many of my friends who had managed to get the invitation to the phenomenon called wave haven't logged in for more than a month. It's too complicated according to some, pretty useless according to some others. Only time will tell if their endeavor to redesign the internet was successful or not.

Android was another offering from the stable of Google.A free source operating system for mobiles, it has got a decent success. The motorola droid in US(running android) has become quite a success.And with HTC, samsung and LG also in line to launch phones with android, it looks that it will pick up momentum and will pretty soon have developers joining in the bandwagon.

Then came the time for offering a navigation feature on the mobiles. Though this feature is available in all it's glory only in the US, this was a great offering where you could do a voice search for a location, and the mobile would guide you turn by turn using the built in voice guidance system. When other companies would charge a hefty fee for the same feature, Google decided to provide the feature free in keeping up with it's ideology, "Don't be evil".

Now comes the next major evolution on Google's part, a technology from the future. Now you can just capture any image from your camera phone and do a google search on that image. A small part of the augmented reality program where the internet and real life mesh together, it's only a beginning, but a beginning no doubt. One can imagine that google will keep pace with the technological development and will soon attach it's massive database in meaningful ways to the real life.The above two services as expected were designed with the android mobile operating system kept in mind.

Now comes the most controversial aspect of the equation- a phone bearing the brandname of google. It seems that google has supplied mobile phones to all it's employees, in a process called "dogfooding" , to test the phone. There's no official confirmation with regards to the launch of the phone, but details have started emerging. It's codenamed Nexus One and is made by HTC according to Google'd hardware specifications. And no prizes for guessing that it runs the latest operating system( Android 2.1).According to Gartner smart phones will outsell laptops this yearr & will generate more revenue($192bn) than laptops ($152bn) by 2012.And it looks like google has set it's sights on this market.Here are some photos:

 


















There are reports that the phone is fast to operate and comes with an OLED screen with the same size as motorola droid.While it is a multi touch smartphone, still pinch to zoom features do not seem to work in this regard. Now how & whether google will launch the phone can be left on the shoulders of time only. But it is an interesting news. Wait for the next article on Google's next product: Chrome OS for net & notebooks.