Google, I will buy your phone on the condition you....
Wish 1: Please try to be as open as possible; not just in aspects of the phone design but also in choice of carriers as well as your billing and ancillary services. This gives your customers more freedoms and will cut the costs of ownership. While other companies may see giving customers freedom of choice as a threat; you might see this as an opportunity to win a great deal more business through customer satisfaction and loyalty than your competitors will ever have through control and manipulation.
Wish 2. Whatever the interface you select for the phone, please keep it simple and clean. For example, don't make me tap 5 times to send a single SMS message. Give me the same freedoms and simplicity we are accustomed to with the Web. We don't expect your phone to look or feel like an operating system or anything other than an easy-to-use phone.
Wish 3. Make your phone capable of connecting at 3G or better speeds. You can not hope to provide a media rich platform for services like YouTube, while at the same time forcing your users to connect at modem speeds. This will be seen by some as a deliberate limitation built in to force people to upgrade before they truly need to.
Wish 4. Allow your phone to connect to WiFi networks for surfing and even for calls when WiFi is available. That way your end users will benefit from cheap or free service while they are at work, at home or near a hotspot. Surely this kind of thing will force the carriers to adopt better pricing for their networks; and will ultimately benefit you by making your services easier and cheaper to access by all.
Wish 5. Please do not make 'DRM' media mandatory; and if you do support DRM, allow the user a range of choices rather than locking them in to a proprietary service, say “gTunes”, for example. People will slowly wise up to this approach and grow to resent having to re-purchase media they already paid for if they choose to move computer platforms or phones at some future point.
Wish 6. Allow the phone to sync with contacts, calenders and offline files, as well as connect to other devices. You will probably want it to sync with your own services, but please keep it open enough to connect with services and devices that are in popular usage. This will reduce the cost to us of changing to your services and will result in more sales for you.
Wish 7. Consider other countries and other markets in your rollout of your services. Appreciating you are a US-based corporation, the true marketplace for your services is global. Lack of adoption of universal standards and short-sited tactics like regional lock-ins will only create inertia and damage the credibility of your offering.
Wish 8. Keep it simple. Simplicity reduces price, size and battery consumption. Complex systems are hard to use, slow and more prone to security problems.