Five trends from Google that will change how we think about mobile

You’re in a restaurant in France. The menu looks delightful, but it’s all in French and you don’t know what to order. So you whip out your mobile, take a photo of the menu and Google Goggles whirs into action, digesting the French text and presenting you with an English version that you can make sense of.

This was just one of the many applications that Robert Hamilton, Google’s Mobile Product Manager, presented while speaking on the future of mobile at gSouth Africa in Cape Town on Monday.

During a wide-ranging and stimulating presentation, Hamilton explained how Google looks for long term trends that it can rely on and banks on them. He used the example of GMail, launched in 2004, that changed the game for webmail by offering 2GB of storage free. At the time it was unheard of to offer more than 25MB free, but Google bet that it would soon be standard.

YouTube launched in 2005 at a time when hardware was expensive, uploading was difficult and there were multiple video players to choose from. YouTube presented something simple and compelling in its flash-based video player — which then became the standard.

With this in mind, Hamilton presented key trends Google are tracking in the mobile sphere.

1. A mobile phone is a computer in your pocket with the abilities of speech via its speaker, touch and sight via its screen, hearing via a mic, and spatial awareness via GPS. That makes it one of the most powerful tools ever created.

2. The prices of these devices are falling all the time, and it won’t be long before this level of sophistication is available to everyone, along with unprecedented levels of connectivity.

3. The concept of cloud computing has had a profound impact on the mobile world, enabling phones to run sophisticated applications that would previously have required too much processing power to execute. (Just ask the guys at MXit, the country’s largest social network that is mainly phone based.)

4. Voice is going to become more dominant on the mobile phone. Google’s Voice Search app lets you speak your Google search queries and hear the results returned. This trend will continue to grow. You will be able to speak one language into your phone, and then push a button which will translate what you have said into another language, or you can use your voice to enter an SMS and watch as the phone translates it into text ready to be sent.

5. The browser will beat apps, because it is an open standard. Hamilton was ambivalent about the surge in apps, arguing that in years to come it is likely that the browser will fulfill all the functions that apps currently do. Firstly, he argued that the browser is an open standard. He reminded us that open standards always win in the long term. Secondly, developing for the browser is uniform across Android, iOS, Symbian, RIM and many platforms. This is a gigantic blessing for developers as you need to code only once, and it does not require any development kit or licensing fees.

The browser also lets you experiment quickly and easily. There are no updates that need to be installed because it is all online. Moreover, no approvals are needed from the ‘gatekeepers’ of the app stores.

These trends are informing the work that Google is doing in the mobile realm. And it’s all grounded in finding solutions to real-life problems that affect ordinary people. At the end of the day, Google sees the mobile device as being able to deliver so much more than just search results. Your phone should be able to deliver a map when you are lost, or a crucial phone number right when you need it. At that point, the mobile phone will really be delivering on all the promise that it holds.