Last night at Mobile World Congress 2010, Google’s Eric Schmidt took to the stage to give us all an update on what Google’s plans are for the mobile market. Read on to find out more…

Mobile first
One of the quotes from last night’s conference that really picked-up our ears was “mobile first”, said by Google Chief Eric Schmidt. Given Google’s recent focus on Android, this may not be all hot air either. It still represents a turnaround though, when Google have always been thought of as the “Internet search guys”.

Schmidt’s reasoning for this “mobile first” strategy was refreshingly blunt, “Because [mobile is] the high-volume endpoint. It’s not because we’re nice people or something.” That certainly made us chortle.

Voice recognition
The key technology that Google bigged-up in the speech was voice recognition. The dream is more than just recognising between people talking, with Google’s aspirations reaching out to being able to talk to people speaking different languages. At the moment it may all sound a bit Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, but with mobile processors progressing at an exponential rate, it’s not an entirely crazy suggestion.

It would involve recognising speech patterns and translating on the fly, which would not only require a huge amount of processing power, but a lot of research too. In the end, all you’d have to do is talk, and a translated version would be piped over to whoever you’re talking to. We don’t doubt that Google is already working on it.

A less advanced voice demo was shown off at the conference – voice search. Using voice search, Google’s servers take an audio clip of you saying the name of whoever you want to search about – using your phone’s mic – and voice search works out what you’re saying. No more typing required.

Google Goggles Translation
Google also showed off Google Goggles. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), this can find text in any image, and then translate it within seconds. Imagine how useful that could be when you’re on holiday, presented with an incomprehensible sign – that could say anything from “Danger” to “Free Ice Cream”.

Google Goggles hasn’t been released yet, but it’ll be available long before Schmidt’s voice-to-voice translation. We’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Merging desktop and mobile
The merging of desktop and mobile computers  started happening a long time ago, but Schmidt brought it home with an Android demonstration, showing the NY Times running over Flash on a handset. If you don’t get the dig here, the Apple iPhone doesn’t support flash, so wouldn’t be able to do this.

You’re probably safe to make a dig or two when you’re one of the top people in one of the most important companies in the world though. Google also revealed its plans to support full Flash on Android, rather than just Flash lite.

No Nexus 2
Schmidt’s speech was more about the future than any specific products, so sadly we’re none the wiser about what the Google Nexus 2 will look like.

Our money’s still on a QWERTY-equipped device, with previous reports of a handset similar to the Motorola Milestone very possible, considering the Google Nexus One was made by HTC.

Quotes originally published by Engadget

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