Google's Larry Page Says A Longer Lasting Phone Is Coming/ Page’s Wish List for a Smartphone

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Jessica Leber
April 18, 2013
A Longer Lasting Phone? Google's Larry Page Says It's Coming

Improved battery life and durability could be big selling points for new phones from Motorola.

In his January earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page complained that our phones died too quickly and broke too easily. On Google’s next quarterly earnings call today, he cited the same concerns and said new products being cooked up at Motorola Mobility would address them. Google acquired for $12.5 billion last May (see “What Ideas Does Google Have Brewing at Motorola?”).
“Having just seen Motorola’s upcoming products myself, I’m really excited about the potential there,” he said on the call, after talking about his frustrations. If Motorola can sell a high-functioning Android phone that really pushes the needle forward on both those fronts, it would be an exciting development indeed.
What technologies could pull this off? One possiblity is that the phone will contain manufactured sapphire rather than the standard Corning Gorilla Glass that forms the outer layer of the display on many devices today (see “Your Next Smartphone Screen May Be Made of Sapphire”). Sapphire is harder than any other material except a diamond and would make a display much harder to crack or scratch. The costs of making such a display are coming down and a display that contains even a thin layer of the material could be feasible this year. Improved battery life could come more simply, as the result of buying the next generation of smartphone chips that consume less battery power, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 processors expected to ship mid-year.
Rumors about the specifications of a device that has been dubbed Google’s X-Phone support both these thoughts, but those rumors are, again, just that. However, by talking about these issues twice now in a very prominent forum, Page is committing himself to delivering something better. Personally, I’m so frustrated with my Android phone’s battery life and the spiderweb cracks across its screen that, at this point, I would pretty much buy any phone that offered serious improvements. I doubt I’m alone, and Page likely knows it.


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http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/04/19/heres-larry-pages-wish-list-for-a-smartphone/?mod=djemTECH_h

• April 19, 2013, 2:53 PM

Here’s Larry Page’s Wish List for a Smartphone

By Matthew Lynley

Getty Images

We might have picked up a hint on Google’s earnings call yesterday as to the master plan for Motorola.
Google still isn’t done tuning Motorola Mobility for exactly for what it needs, and the end game isn’t 100% clear. Take the last earnings call, for example: Google CFO Patrick Pichette said Google still had a lot of products to work through before we would see Google’s master plan come into shape.
However, time marches on and as that pipeline comes to a close, Google is reportedly working on a “Google X phone” that would compete with other top Android smartphones and the iPhone.
So, what would such an “X Phone” look like? It might be a little simpler than we think, given what CEO Larry Page said on the earnings call yesterday. Here’s one of the key phrase from the call:

“When you drop your phone, it shouldn’t shatter. There’s real potential to invent new and better experiences. Having just seen Motorola’s upcoming products myself, I’m pretty enthusiastic.”

It’s straightforward and reads like a wish list for smartphones — but this is Google, which is known for building fringe projects that end up blowing up into highly functional services, like Gmail and the search browser Chrome. So it’s worth treating this as something beyond just a wish list.
Page explained the rationale for Google’s fringe 20% projects — like self-driving cars — a little later in the call:

“Take Gmail — when we released that we were a search company. It was a leap for us to put out an email product, let alone one that gave users hundreds of times as much storage as anyone else.
It’s why we’re investing in what appear to be speculative projects today, such as self-driving cars. We found that with ambitious goals and a committed team, you can make progress pretty quickly. There’s not much competition, because no one else is crazy enough to try.”

So there may yet be something up Google’s sleeve when it comes to creating a new smartphone “experience” that, like many of Google’s products, just works.