What I was commenting on was more that I’m not convinced yet that Google is going to play a big role in that sort of thing.

Personally, I think the OpenMoko project is going to do more cool things for cheap phone service in places like Africa. They’ll have all the things like Jabber but without any possible copyright restrictions that plague other phone hardware and software.

And then of course there are issues of pricing that don’t seem to depend on technology but on lack of credit and cash. Pre-paid data plans in Uganda from my experience are quite expensive and horribly slow. In Gulu, which is not exactly a hotbed of technological progress, both the CDMA and GPRS networks were pretty saturated. Post-paid plans are much cheaper, but the problem is that most Africans in places like that don’t have sufficient credit or upfront cash to get one.

If people did start getting GPRS phones the networks would be even more saturated which is likely to make data plans more expensive anyway.

Regardless of what they’ve done in the past, I’m interested in seeing what they do, if they do in fact, create a mobile phone with associated OS and app integration.

From reading your blog I see you have spent some time in Uganda. If Google is able to crack open a better platform on mobile phones that works worldwide, I am all for it.

For instance, you already realize that Gtalk is nothing more than a rebranded version of Jabber. Imagine if that were to supplant SMS in Uganda. The cost of sending text on a data plan is far cheaper than any SMS rate. If that comes natural on an inexpensive Google phone, or is available on any phone running a Java Google OS, that would be significant.

I have to say though that I’m skeptical about how great this will be. For one, payment by text message doesn’t seem to me a fantastic idea for security reasons. Payment through RFID tags seems simpler, less error prone, and is already implemented in several places.

Moreover, Google doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to revolutionary technology. Beyond PageRank and subsequent revisions of their ranking algorithm they haven’t done a ton to revolutionize anything. Google maps has a neat interface, and I like google scholar a lot, but I find regular google just as effective most of the time..

What Google seems to do best is take existing technology and make the user interface slightly better and make the code faster. This is basically what they did with webmail. Other “revolutionary” projects just aren’t that great. Think Orkut, google groups, froogle, and tons of other projects that I’m forgetting. Google video wasn’t fantastic until they bought YouTube, and the Google photo application is less cool than Flikr, which is less used that Facebook.

The patent for GPay was filed in 2006 when there was a lot of speculation that Google was going to release a paypal killer. Then they released Google Checkout (which was also originally dubbed GPay by many) and nobody seemed to care. I imagine GPay is a way to get patents on existing pay-by-SMS services.