LG Electronics Inc. has reached an agreement with Google (GOOG) to bundle in its search products on its mobile phones. LG said it plans to start shipping select handsets with Google Maps, Blogger Mobile and Gmail during the second quarter of this year. Google search will be available with “one click access” via a screen icon, which will lower the connection times from phone to web.
This is after Samsung basically made the same sort of pact earlier in the year with Google, and has come out of the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, Florida. If these LG phones and Samsung phones are being bundled with Google inside, that makes it less and less likely that they would be competing against themselves.
Since there has not been any announcement of a Google Phone, which was sort of canned as an idea and which started putting to rest rumors of Google as a hardware player in the cell phone market, this should make the last couple of days be the unofficial end of the company being speculated on as a maker of a cell phone. For now at least.
We did call this the equivalent of hearsay two weeks ago because so many rumors have been in the marketplace before, but here is what we had noted on the impacts IF Google were to enter the space.
Jon C. Ogg
March 28, 2007
Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.
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