motorola-shadow-render

No, this is not the official press photos Nokia Mirage (Shadow), but we must admit, we certainly would not mind if it really such a debut. Word is that this upcoming Motorola Android handset, which looks like a trimmed down their popular twin Droid / Milestone, may actually be a Nexus Enterprise Two phone mentioned in the recent news.

Specifications reported from Mirage Motorola saliva, of course, and certainly makes it worth the upgrade to the Nexus One. There is no strong evidence to support this course, but given how Motorola has helped in increasing the popularity of Android phone platform Droid, not exactly take a genius to know why Google would want to partner with Nokia for the next handset they offer.

This is pure speculation right now, but it certainly makes sense. Hopefully, more information will be available in a few weeks to support this report. For now, you just drool over the images provided Motorola Shadow created by people at Mobile01 to your hearts content.

[alfred's blog via engadget]

Google-Nexus-One-002

Last Tuesday, Google finally confirmed it was entering the hardware market with the launch of its mobile handset. The Nexus One is made to Google’s specifications by HTC, a Taiwanese company, and runs the latest version of Android software, an open source operating system already running on some handsets, including those made by HTC, and Motorola.

Salivating over a head-to-head competition between Google, Apple and the mainstream news media made so much of it as they could. The BBC has even sent its technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, to Google’s headquarters, where he obeyed has asked whether the company thought its new mobile competition for Apple’s iPhone would give. The Google spokeswoman waffled, but need not have bothered. The reality is that, in most respects, the Google phone is inferior to the products of Apple.

That’s not to say that not a few nice features of a powerful processor chips do not, for example, the ability to walk more than one application at a time, a nice screen with a much higher resolution than those of the iPhone, turn-by-turn navigation (with Street View, so you can see your destination), voice recognition software, which – depending on whom you speak – works 90% of the time, etc.

But it also has a relatively small number of downloadable applications and very little memory to store them, there is no easy way to get music files to the device, and the attraction of high-resolution screen is a bit dented by the fact that it does not support a multi-touch “interactions in the way the Apple product. Whatever else the Google phone is an” iPhone killer “it is not.

But maybe that’s intentional. Despite their tender years, the guys who run Google consistently shown a good understanding of military strategy, the first law of those who always decline to fight in territory dominated by your enemy and the fight only on the ground where the advantage that you have. So many years, Google will avoid in the PC operating system market – Microsoft’s borrowing – and concentrate instead on searching and networking services, where it was overwhelmingly dominant.

This also explains its mobile strategy. They recognize that the functional elegance of the iPhone comes out of a total control of both the hardware and software. This kind of service achievement, that Apple’s stock-in-trade, it would be difficult to quickly obtain, even for a company that is as smart as Google.

So they made the software – the Android operating system – then get it away to any device manufacturer who wants to use it. Google thus effectively ensures that the smartphone market will be flooded by devices which, while not perhaps with all the features of the iPhone, still giving consumers more reasons not to buy the Apple device. In this sense, the implicit message of the Nexus, one of which is: “It is a good non-Apple smartphone might be like, now go ahead and multiply.”

It is also implicit in the network strategy, Google has designed for the device. You can buy it unlocked for $ 529 (£ 330) and use it on a mobile network or get it for $ 179 (£ 112) from T-mobile on a two-year contract. Compare this with the iPhone, which is essentially tethered to contracts with the network operator’s choice of Apple in each of the 94 countries where it is on offer. If it works, it will mean that the mobile phone market will soon be many non-Apple smartphones providing their users with an Internet connection on the move, along with access to location-based advertising and other services.

Google’s nightmare is that Apple has a dominant hold on the mobile Internet and its associated advertising business can get. It is not just paranoia. Last week, news broke that Apple is a mobile advertising outfit called Quattro Wireless calls for a reported $ 275M. So Google’s fears about Steve Jobs & Co. are rational, fueled by the realization that the days when Apple was just a funny computer manufactures have long gone, its current market cap ($ 193bn), it is almost as valuable as Google ( $ 198bn).

And Apple is building a large cloud-computing infrastructure, including a $ 1bn data center, which is probably the world’s biggest server farm in North Carolina. The iPhone / Nexus competition was interesting, but is really only a skirmish in what could become an interesting battle.