Free iPhone

It is now official that there will be a Google Phone coming soon. Not just a rebranded HTC, this is the real deal; a 100% Google branded, sold and supported phone – and it’ll be called the Nexus One.

How this will affect the iPhone’s supremacy will be seen over the next 18 months or so – Google has a long way to go to match the runaway success of the iPhone. But they do have a track record of doing things well, as we all know from their success taking over the internet search sytem, web based email, and now their delve into social networking with Wave.

It is fully expected that the Google phone will incorporate all of these features at some stage, and much more

The phone will come loaded with at least a Google Navigation tool, and the new Google Googles.

How much?

The biggest question on my mind at the moment is how much the Nexus One will cost. To be successful as the newest and greatest smartphone on the market Google are going to have to do something a bit special. an they rely on some clever feature to make us buy their phone over an iPhone, or even a Blackberry with its new app store feature.

The only reason I would buy a Google Phone would be if it could match the iPhone in terms of features and applications AND be cheaper. Much in the same way as I haven’t binned Firefox for Google Chrome, I won’t be ditching my iPhone in favour of the Google phone unless it can offer me something much more financially.

Will there be a Free Google Phone plan? I hope so, and think that may be the only way for Google to make their mark on the World of smartphones in a real way. The Android is dead, but the Google phone could well be king.

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I have recently started using Google Wave – this is the newest innovation from Google and is so powerful it could even change the way we use the web. I have a number of free Google Wave invites to give away to my readers, this is strictly first come-first served, just leave a comment on this post, and I will send the invitation code to the email address you enter in the box.

If you don’t yet know what Google Wave is, join the club.  It is still only in beta so there will be a few bugs, and just like wordpress and firefox, Google have integrated an open source area into Wave so developers can create ‘wave gadgets’ to do all kinds of great things. Over time, we should see more of these gadgets being released making Google Wave even more powerful.

Mashable have produced a Google Wave Guide which looks great, but you will need to have quite a few contacts also using Wave to be able to try out most of its functionality.

I’m still learning what it can do, and more importantly, what it can do for me! I am going to try to embed a wave in my new Free Gadgets blog (a site that literally gives away any free gadget you want).

So if you want a Google Wave invitation, just let me know below.

These invitations are limited, so please only request one if you will make use of it.

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I got quite a shock this morning when browsing Google as I found a very positive  article about my free iPhone website on Google News – in position 3.

Hopefully this will help my site gain some credibility with all the sceptics out there, and it should drive some traffic my way too.

As I don’t imagine it will stay there for very long, here’s a screenshot I took. Mine is the 3rd link down.

Google have released a mobile version of their Google books service, enabling free iPhone users to have access to 1.5M (in the US, 0.5M everywhere else) public domain books.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your free iPhone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.

To make the books readable on the iPhone, Google extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short). The following example demonstrates the difference between page images and the extracted text:

=> “Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson— which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. …”

The extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books’ pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text. The example below shows the page image from the original manuscript for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. In this extreme case, the extracted text is riddled with errors:

=> “lV~e.il!” .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve …

Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books.  Google’s computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows Google books to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.

To try it out, point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m and begin reading. If you come across patches where the text seems wrong you can just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text.

Google’s free iPhone app, Google Mobile, was already extremely handy with the addition of the much-vaunted voice search, but it turns out that it’s got more features than anybody first realized.


The Google Mobile team just blogged about an easter egg, a hidden menu in the free iPhone app that enables some extra goodies and options. To find it, go to the Settings tab in Google Mobile, and keep trying to scroll down below the “About” option at the bottom. Eventually, a menu called Bells and Whistles will appear. This is pretty low class to “hide” something like this, but hey, developers have to have a little fun too, right?

So what are these options?

Some of them are actually sounds: you can replace the default sounds with chicken or monkey noises, if for some odd reason you wish to. You can also change the colour of the Google Mobile Theme and see a live waveform when you talk. This is all kind of fun, but not that super-useful. But that isn’t the whole story…

The reason you really want to find this easter egg is the “open links in app” option. Some commentators argue that it should have been there in the first place and not hidden, and I agree with them. To “hide” a feature like this is much less charming than your free iPhone making chicken sounds.