Google today announced its intent to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. While Google assures its other Android licensees that the platform will remain open and license-free, product strategists at Samsung, LG, and HTC are certain to revisit their Windows Phone hedge strategy. We see two key reasons for Google to take the risk of alienating its other hardware partners:

• Intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. Google brings little to the table in the form of patents relevant to handsets and tablets, forcing Android licensees to beef up their own portfolios in the legal derring-do that, for example, has Samsung Galaxy tablets locked out of the European market by Apple lawsuits. Motorola’s rich collection of patents greatly strengthens Google’s position at the IPR table.
• It’s a multidevice, multiconnection world. Consumers are no longer reliant on one dominant device like the PC for their connection to the content, commerce, communications, and comfort that the Net provides. Instead, they have multiple choices sitting in front of them at any moment and are often connected to more than one — today it’s the PC, tablet, phone, and TV, but connections are beginning to pervade the car and myriad devices in the home. Android is present in most of these devices today and aims, with GoogleTV and Android@home, to be in all of them. Excepting the PC, Motorola has products in these market segments today and is the only large original equipment manufacturer (OEM) exclusively reliant on Android for its mobile devices.

Today Google announced its Google Wallet product, along with partners Sprint, Citi, MasterCard, and First Data (Forrester clients can read our more detailed take on this announcement here). While Google Wallet will initially support Citi-branded MasterCards, the product is open and will accept payment solutions from multiple networks and issuers. Google introduced its Wallet by saying, “This is just starting,” and Google’s right — the path to the new world of transactions that the company painted will be a long and arduous one for consumer product strategists. Why?

• Not many phones. Today the number of phones on the market that support Google Wallet is as close to zero as makes no difference — the Nexus S that Sprint launched on May 8^th. That will change — by the end of 2012, we expect that virtually every smartphone sold will include NFC.
• Not many issuers. Consumers want to be able to use their existing payment options, not have to sign up for a new credit or debit card in order to use their phone.
• Not many merchants. Consumers don’t want to have to look for an acceptance mark; they expect that the merchants they frequent will support the payment options in their wallet. While PayPass terminals are becoming more prevalent, they are a long way from ubiquitous.
• Not much incentive for consumers. Some consumers might say it’s convenient to just carry their phone, but wallets hold a lot more than just payment instruments. And it’s not clear that pulling out our phone, opening an app, inputting a PIN, and waving our phone at the POS is more convenient than swiping a credit card or exchanging cash.

Nokia’s announcement in London on Friday that Microsoft’s Windows Phone would be its primary smartphone platform for the future represents a dramatic shift in its smartphone strategy, one that it hopes will resurrect its once-dominant position in that market. And Microsoft hopes that adding the scale, reach, and technology of the global leader in mobile phone shipments will establish its platform as “the third ecosystem” alongside those of Apple and Google. Our clients can read Forrester’s take from a product strategy perspective here; here’s a summary:

• Nokia’s choice is the least bad among its options. Nokia rightly distilled its choice to among three, the alternatives to Microsoft being to stick with the Symbian and MeeGo platforms that Nokia controls or to join the Android bandwagon. Symbian has proven itself noncompetitive with customers, operators, and developers; MeeGo, with one lone device in the market, is a nonentity. Google’s platform would have rendered Nokia a “me-too” competitor — albeit one with massive scale — having to play catch-up in an extremely fast-moving market. Microsoft’s platform offers Nokia the possibility to create products that will motivate consumers and operators to buy, and help convince developers to elevate Windows Mobile in their priority list.

This morning AT&T announced new data pricing for its mobile customers. Today's $30 per month unlimited use plan will be replaced by two plans:

• $15 per month for up to 200 megabytes of data, with additional blocks of 200 MB at $15 each.
• $25 per month for up to 2 gigabytes of data, with additional blocks of 1 GB at $10 each.

AT&T's CEO of Consumer, Ralph de la Vega, has publicly suggested on multiple occasions that network operators need to address the small percentage of subscribers that abuse unlimited usage plans and degrade the experience of others on the network. These suggestions have been met with howls by many, and I expect that we'll see similar reactions to this latest change. But will those reactions be justified? The answer depends on whether you believe AT&T's data on its current data users.

Mark Collins, AT&T's Senior VP of Data and Voice Products, told us that 65% of today's smartphone data users consume less than 200 MB of data per month, and 98% of them use less than 2 GB of data per month. These data plans then represent an opportunity for virtually all of AT&T's data customers to reduce their monthly data charges. For consumer product strategists, this change shows a remarkably (and, for some, surprisingly) customer-centric viewpoint. Why?

Today Apple previewed the next version — 4.0 — of the iPhone OS, the software that powers the company's iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad products, a preview version of which it is unleashing on developers today. Apple will release the product to iPhone and iPod Touch owners this summer, and to iPad owners in the Fall. Apple's customers and partners will largely welcome the innovations in this new release, though there are undoubtedly segments who will complain vehemently. Specifically: