Google Phone

First Apple shows the world how voice mail and three way conferencing should be done with the iPhone, and now there is a Google phone in the works.

I doubt that Google's hardware will be as spectacular as Apple's, whose industrial design has been fantastic since the old iMac in the late 90s, but I'm intrigued by what the pricing will be like. Apple is selling very expensive hardware, plus the usual expensive voice/data plan, plus vendor lock-in, while Google will subsidize service with ads other stuff tied to the rules they asked for the upcoming spectrum auction (which I currently have not looked at, and do not understand).

And on more telco news, ooma (who I first learned about many months ago while they were still very stealthy) has finally launched. David Pogue, of the NYTimes, describes it as a $400-$600 box which, lets you place free calls all over the US (so long as it does not get out of business, and so long as it can get 1,500 boxes installed for free). It requires landline phone service, which I have not had for almost a year, as landline phone service is ludicrously expensive.

I'll say more about ooma and the google phone in a future post.