Mobile ambitions
It generally accepted that smartphones are going to be one of the key battle-grounds for the technology industry in the near future, that's why we talk about them so much.
Google has already made a big play to be a dominant player in this market with the development of its Android operating system, which seems to have real momentum behind it.
But, of course, Google's real strength and source of revenue is search, so it's interesting to see that it has chosen to make a big fuss about a relatively some improvements to its mobile search service.
Quite rightly, Google has concluded that search on a phone will be much more useful if its voice - rather than text - driven. Hence we have Google search by voice, and the big news today is that it's now available for the Nokia S60 handset and now recognises Mandarin Chinese.
Big deal, you might think, but this announcement seems really to be a pretext to bring attention to the Google Mobile App, which provides voice search and also produces localised results - i.e. it finds out where you are and gives you results that are geographically relevant.
If the speech recognition is as good as the Google video below suggests it is, there's no reason why Google can't become as dominant in the mobile search market as it already is in PC search. Ominous stuff.
