Google, Trending Mobiles
This guest post was written by Jade Scully. Jade Scully is a copywriter, blogger and online marketing enthusiast who has published her work on a series of online publications and websites including Leeulekker who provide a range of advertising and marketing resources for southern Africans.
A few months ago, at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, Google’s Mobile Product Manager, Robert Hamilton, spoke of the key trends that Google were (and probably still are) tracking in the mobile sphere.
Imagine being able to take a photo with your mobile camera of a menu written in a foreign language and being able to use Google to translate the words for you as you sit and wait for your drink? This is just one of the apps that Hamilton presented at the conference.
Here are a few other key pointers that he discussed:
1. Mobile Phones: a computer in your pocket
It has the ability of speech, touch and sight and hearing via its speaker, screen and microphone respectively, as well as spatial awareness via its GPS – arguably this makes it one of the most powerful tools ever to be created.
2. Cloud Computing: the mobile world
This enables mobiles to be able to run sophisticated applications that would previously have required way too much processing to actually execute.
3. Voice Dominance: the mobile phone
Google’s Voice Search App (my favourite) allows you to speak out your Google searches and then hear the results read back to you. The impact this will have on visually impaired people is phenomenal. For travel ease, in the future you will be able to speak one language into your phone, and have it translated into another language at the push a button. You could also use your voice to say SMSes out loud and watch the words being automatically typed onto your phone. The potential implications of these functions for disabled people, those who know only one language but want to travel and people who have not had the privilege of a decent education is astounding.
These trends are a tiny indication of the focus that Google is placing on the mobile realm. What’s amazing about their work is that these functions are all geared towards finding solutions to problems that are face by normal, everyday people, just like you and me.