A Message After the Beep

You have to give it credit: no other phone has had the staying power of the iPhone. Sure, the RAZR had its day, and you have to admire the pluck of Blackberry users desperately pecking at their keyboards, but when it comes right down to it, Apple’s strange alchemy of design, status symbology and Jobsian keynotes made the iPhone the only device worth having. Devotees of the cult stress that the phones of today are still trying to catch up to the iPhone of 2007, and they’re not far wrong.

So far, brave attempts to challenge that dominance, like the Palm Pre, typified the problem: a new phone with limited hype, limited app store, limited developer community, and above all, nothing the iPhone wasn’t doing already. No single gimmick could make the Pre stand out, and since it came out alone, with little fanfare or serious backing, it never really had a chance. Manufacturers couldn’t just equal the iPhone’s features, they had to beat them by every possible metric.

2010 might just be the year mobile companies finally start making a serious push against the iPhone, all spearheaded by one of the few companies whose understanding of digital mind-share rivals Apple’s own: Google. Their markets have been largely independent of one another up until recently, but where Apple seeks to create the allure of high-ticket status symbols, Google has been insidiously working its way into every facet of your digital life.

Put aside the search ubiquity for a moment. In just over two years, 150 million Gmail accounts have been created, all free. Google Docs offers a lightweight office suite that backs up all your documents, for free. They have a chat client, a blog reader, and have mapped planet Earth so thoroughly you can see into my window (ignore my wallpaper). All of it free.

And here’s their pitch: Wouldn’t you want all that great stuff on a phone actually made by Google?

Google’s ‘Android’ phone (tentatively called the Nexus One) is set to show up this year, and while they may always struggle against Apple’s museum-quality design, they will enter the market with an instant fan base of millions of existing users. Like sleeper agents, only nerdier.