T-Mobile Europe, Google Join Forces

T-Mobile's European arm will use Google as the home page for its T-Zones mobile Internet access on its mobile phones, the company announced on Wednesday. The wireless operator hopes the change will promote greater Internet usage on its service.

In a period where phone revenues are falling, companies are hoping compelling data services will offset these losses. T-Mobile says it is moving towards offering easier access to the full Internet rather than just a select group of Web sites as is common today among service providers.

"With the Google homepage we want to tell our customers from the first moment that they are carrying with them the Internet they know from home," T-Mobile board member Ulli Gritzuhn told reporters at T-Mobile's German headquarters.

T-Mobile will also include the Opera Web browser to enable full Web browsing on the Nokia 6680 3G handset.

Customer surveys have shown that the current offerings from mobile operators are of little use to subscribers and customers who do use them do so infrequently. "Too expensive, too complicated, too little use -- that's our clients' judgment about our current data services," Gritzuhn explained.

According to the company, no decision has been made yet as to whether T-Mobile's US arm will follow suit and use Google as well.