Google and Motorola team up to put more of your life at your fingertips

Speak to the mobile tech whizzes at Motorola they’ll tell you the future looks blurry.

That’s because they expect the line between what you can do on a smartphone and what you can do on a computer to smudge in the years ahead.

“If you look at a smartphone today, it’s what used to power the laptops of the past,” says Mahmoud Sayedahmed, Motorola’s head of marketing for mobile devices in the region.

“That convergence of a device that is mobile and portable, that has the power of computing - and all the things you want to do - is becoming this blurred line and that line will become a lot more blurred.”

He insists: “It’s very much going to be about services and applications that fit around you.”

It’s one of the reasons that the world’s biggest search engine Google bought Motorola at the end of last month for a tidy $12.5 billion - the internet giant’s largest ever purchase.

Google’s managing director the Middle East and North Africa, Ari Kesisoglu, says the company is “looking at mobile first.”

“We know it’s the future,” he says. Neither Motorola nor Google will directly tell you what the massive deal will bring to the table for each - yet. Speak to both Kesisoglu and Sayedahmed though and one word that continuously crops up is “innovation”.

Sayedahmed says that within two years “everything I consume has to be portable.”

“We need to bring more and more innovation to the mobile stage,” he says.

“If I want to watch a programme - any programme, at any time, anywhere in the world - then today, you can do it [but] with a little bit of pain. The future is viewing it wherever you want it, whenever you want it.”

A crucial aspect of the mobile goal, according to the Motorola man, is customising content. “The phone’s going to start understanding my different personas - I’m a father, a businessman, I play sports with this group of friends, I like this pop group,” he says.

Sayedahmed says his eyebrows were raised by a recent survey showing just how attached we are to our palm-held pals.

“It said 97 per cent said a mobile phone was the thing they couldn’t live without - then spouse came in at about 57 per cent.” And as sad as it sounds, it’s probably fair to say every mobile firm would happily see the first of those stats hit a cool 100 per cent.

Because the fact is, this is one of the fastest growing industries on earth - with heavyweights like facebook, Google, Samsung and Apple all furiously battling for the right to be king of an industry whose time has come.

“It’s an industry that’s moving at the speed of light,” agrees Sayedahmed.

“The useful thing about it is that you’ve got a consumer that’s absolutely willing to go on the journey.” Recently, internet search engine leader Google’s fierce rival facebook set up an HQ in Dubai.

But get this - Google ‘likes’ that.

“We think competition is good for the users,” says Kesisoglu. “If there’s competition then that encourages innovation - and that’s what we want to do at Google, we want to be at the forefront of innovation. We think competition makes that even better.”