Patent spills beans on Googlephone

IN A country where you need to patent the wheel otherwise somebody else will, if you want to find out if Google's really working on a mobile phone, then look at its patent filings.

Mad4mobilephones searched and guess what? It found one. The accompanying drawing puts paid to any doubt that the device is a mobile phone. It's a classic flip-phone design.

Some doubters are still trying to maintain that it might just be a VoIP/WiFi phone. Possibly. But then, why would you post an advert for an analogue designer/engineer?

If there's only going to be one radio - WiFi - then using the associated chip maker's reference design would be good enough. You woundn't need to build a "small team of top-notch Logic Designers and Analog Designers aimed at nothing less than making the entire world's information accessible from anywhere for free," just for WiFi.

That sounds like a team building a cellular phone - probably a dual mode (WiFi/cellular) phone - or a team building two models: - a cdmaOne and a GSM compatible mobile phone.

The motivation for all this phone building is obvious - location based services. Hence the line in the patent "a computer-implemented method of providing text entry assistance data is disclosed."

This phone wants to second-guess what you're searching for. The company that should be worried about all this is actually Tegic (maker of T9). Goggle may be designing a much better method of predictive data input based on behaviour not dictionaries.

Several INQ readers have pointed to possible tie-ups with Vodafone and Apple as a reason for all this activity. It's possible the patent relates to technology built into the iPhone. But it's way too late to need analogue designers for Apple's offering.

Nope. Google must be preparing a cellular phone of some kind. It's about time it confessed.

More on this story here, here and here. µ