Google Phone – A Better Fit for Virtual Instrumentation than the iPhone?

The Google phone is now available. The Apple iPhone received coverage based on the multitouch screen technology. While that may be helpful to virtual instrumentation what is even more valuable is its ability to find the best price available for mobile services. In the early days of NI working with wireless we invited partners to give presentations on their experience with wireless communications and their test and measurement applications. In one presentation, the partner spent the entire hour talking about the various tradeoffs among the services -- what services worked in what application and how the price varied based on data volume, time of day, etc. The ability to turn all that over to the phone is a big boost to bringing wireless to the virtual instrument application.

The Google phone may also be better positioned for virtual instrumentation given its open platform. Apple took quite a while before offering an SDK for their phone and since then they rigorously monitor what applications are made available. Google’s approach is much more open and inviting to developers letting the developer customize the phone to their application. Customizability is one of the key tenets of virtual instrumentation.

I’m not alone at National Instruments looking for the day that LabVIEW runs full blown on the iPhone, the GPhone or whatever’s next. In this blog post, fellow NIer Deirdre Walsh considers the implications of LabVIEW on the Gphone.

Louis Gray wrote an insightful post on Google’s strength – web apps over its weakness – media downloads which points to more web applications coming to the Google phone.


Best regards,
Hall T.