On the eve of the launch of the first Android mobile phones, Google has some interesting thoughts on the future of mobile phones:

It has a range of sensors that would do a martian lander proud: a clock, power sensor (how low is that battery?), thermometer (because batteries charge poorly at low temperatures), and light meter (to determine screen backlighting) on the more basic phones; a location sensor, accelerometer (detects vector and velocity of motion), and maybe even a compass on more advanced ones.

Which leads to:

Sensors everywhere: Your phone knows a lot about the world around you. If you take that intelligence and combine it in the cloud with that of every other phone, we have an incredible snapshot of what is going on in the world right now. Weather updates can be based on not hundreds of sensors, but hundreds of millions. Traffic reports can be based not on helicopters and road sensors, but on the density, speed, and direction of the phones (and people) stuck in the traffic jams.

Some interesting business model opportunities there. Maybe one day you’ll get paid to carry a phone, for the sake of the data that it collects. Network operators then aggregate the data and resell …

Even more interesting possibilities arise if the phone acts as a payment device. If people don’t mind their purchases being tracked, that would be very valuable information.