Another Tech Blog

Google’s new phone, the Nexus One was released at CES (I really want to go one year!) and although at first blush the phone seems a rousing success, is Google really prepared to deal with supporting a phone?  Along with the initial sale of the hardware you need to be able to support the people who use the phone and have questions/problems.

Have you ever tried to contact Google?  There are no phone numbers.  No place to call, no human to yell at if your phone stops working or drops a call.  Google’s support model up until this point has been to have forums and email support for its products.  That works very well when you are dealing with software and software services, but phones are different.  User problems are immediate, and people get very mad when they are told sorry, send an email and we’ll get back to you in three days.  That model just won’t work!

According to the NY Times, Google recognizes the problem and says “we have to get better at customer service”.  This from Andy Rubin who is in charge of Android technology for Google.  That sounds great, right?  He goes on to say that instead of taking three days to respond to a customer email, they need to “close that three-day gap to a couple of hours”.  I’m sorry, what?  Are you kidding me?  NO, Mr Rubin, what you need to do is get an 800 number, staff a help desk, and answer people’s questions.   “A couple of hours” is not immediate and just will not do.

And what about enterprise support?  How would I ever think of deploying a device for which I had to wait three days (or a couple of hours) to get support?  It’s laughable.  For a company that gets enterprise computing as well as Google does, I’m really surprised at their complete flat footedness here.

I love most of what Google does – they think about things in unique ways that question the status quo and tend to make real improvements to technologies where I thought improvements were hard to come by and would largely be incremental (think Gmail).  With the Nexus One, I have high hopes that they will eventually pose a real threat to Apples dominance.  That said, Apple REALLY gets customer support and customer loyalty.  If Google has any hope of taping that market, they need to fix their customer service issues.

CNET is reporting that ARM, the company responsible for designing the architecture behind most mobile comuting CPU’s said  that mobile phone makers will be delivering devices that run on ARM”s latest dual core CPU’s as early as next year.

They are referring to the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore application processor.  According to the ARM site, the new chip deisgn will provide faster processing with lower power consumption for all but the most CPU intensive applications.

“The Cortex-A9 MPCore processor is the first ARM processor to combine the Cortex application class architecture with multiprocessing capabilities for scalable performance and provides enhanced multicore technology that includes:

• Accelerator Coherence Port (ACP) for increased system performance and lower system power
• Advanced Bus Interface Unit for low latency in high bandwidth devices
• Multicore TrustZone® technology with interrupt virtualization to enable hardware based security and enhanced paravirtualization solutions
• Generalized Interrupt Controller (GIC) for software portability and optimized multicore communication“

source: AMD product description

White paper on the Cortex-A9.

There are already phones on the market that make use of the ARM A9 single core chip, namely the LG Renoir shown at CES in January (video here).  The phone looks great in the video; the ARM Mali-55 GPU really makes the user interface smooth, with Vista like windows features.  Without the phone in hand I can’t comment direcltly, but I imagine streaming video would look very nice on this phone.  Of course, this phone is not available in the US (why would it be?) but it has some amazing features – 8 Megapixel camera, touch focus, several still shot modes, Dolby Mobile, DivX playback, Slow-Mo video recording, GPS, 3G, WiFi and will play Flash.  It is so irritating the the US mobile companies are just shamefully behind the curve with mobile devices.  I have to believe that most people don’t know what they are missing, so they don’t know to complain.

Since ARM is just the chip designer and not the manufacturer, it’s difficult to tell exactly when these chips will hit US phones, but if CNET is correct, we could see the chips in new phones next year.  If true, then I will NOT buy a iPhone 3GS until I know what Apple is doing with regard to the new ARM design.  Why would you invest in another 2 year contract when you know that the new chip is out there?  If they combine the CPU with the updated GPU chips, then the iPhone’s sluggishness could go away completely.  Now that might be worth $199.