I was interested to read in Marketing Week that Google's acquisition of Motorola's mobile division could see the launch of a "pure Google" smartphone. At the moment, Motorola has only 0.6% share of the UK smartphone market (as opposed to market leader Apple with 26.3%).
Personally I'm looking forward to the day when all phones are smartphones and Apple has some decent competition. But a Google smartphone? I'm fairly neutral when it comes to Google but I'm also aware of the creeping Google-isation of the world. Google+ is only in soft launch but is already big amongst the early adopters. Twitter updates have been dropped from Google search results. And these are just the things I'm aware of as a reasonably informed but relatively casual observer of technology.
As Marketing maagzine noted last week, a recent report from Ofcom suggests that people are becoming 'addicted' to their smartphones, meaning that mobile is gaining in importance as an advertising platform. I've been feeling for a while that mobile will be the marketing battleground of the future, and certainly that's what pundits have been saying for a few years, although it hasn't really happened yet. Now that Google is wading in big time, will that push things on?
