Channel Tech Center

With much fanfare Google today announced that a Nexus One smartphone is now available directly from Google. On the face of it, this would seem like the opening of the smartphone market, much to the potential benefit of solution providers in the channel.

But while the Nexus One smartphone essentially adds another supplier of phones made by HTC, the Google smartphone is still tethered to wireless networks from T-Mobile and, shortly thereafter, Verizon. Oddly enough, the Nexus One smartphone doesn’t work on 3G networks from AT&T, which just happen to be the preferred wireless network for the Apple iPhone.

From a channel perspective, the ideal situation would be to have open carrier networks that could work with any smartphone. But it would literally take an Act of Congress to make that happen. So while the Google Nexus One is a step in the right direction because it at least provides an open source platform for building mobile applications, it’s hardly represents a revolution.

Perhaps one day, Google will build out its own wireless network and then open that network to any and all device makers. That would roughly result in a smartphone market that would be roughly akin to the open approach that created the PC marketplace.

But until that happens, solution providers and their customers are going to be held hostage by carriers. And the price of that closed-minded approach is not only higher costs for consumers, but a lack of innovation that limits to the mobile application space to penny-ante developers of 99 cent applications that most people get bored with an about an hour.

In the meantime, the development of business-class applications for smartphones suffers because the carriers that control the network are just too difficult to do business with, which largely stems from a bunker mentality dedicated to protecting a franchise rather than thinking about how to better exploit it.