Google Phone

Less than a week after the WSJ broke the news that Google would be announcing their Linux-based gPhone OS and accompanying software suite within a fortnight, Monday 5th November is pegged as the day that the search giant will open up what have been notoriously-tight lips regarding the expansion of their business model within the cellular industry.  So far, while handsets will be conspicuous by their absence, the launch is believed to comprise details of the partnerships made with hardware manufacturers and international network operators all willing to fall into line with Google’s “open access” strategy regarding third-party software and handset flexibility.

Rumor also abounds that the core and ethos of this project will be based on Andy Rubin’s Android platform; Rubin, profiled today in the New York Times, was the genius co-founder of Danger and piloted their Sidekick range, and saw his latest project Android picked up by Google in 2005.  It has long been suggested that, thanks to his familiarity with data-centric mobile services, they’ve had him working on the increasingly complex balance of cellular search and targeted advertising needed to support a gPhone OS.

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Just days after we highlighted the parallels between Google’s incipient cellphone strategy and the niche carved out by Sidekick-sires Danger, the net is abuzz with semi-substantiated news that Google will not only be launching its own Google phone OS sometime around the Labor Day weekend, but also partnering with HTC to develop one model from its lineup as a flagship poster-device.

Engadget spills the juicy software details: according to their sources development of the gPhone OS (that’s not the official name, of course) started shortly after Google acquired Android, a mobile software company run by ex-Danger-cofounder Andy Rubin, in 2005. Based on Linux, the OS has apparently been whored around the hardware manufacturers and carriers to promote the idea of a flexible and customisable system with Google integration as one of its strong points.

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With increasing attention from both online and traditional media, the prospect of a Google Phone (or gPhone, or whatever the legal teams can agree on) is raising questions around to what extent the search company might be moving out of their software comfort zone and into hardware. Opinion is already split over how successful Google could be if left in charge of a section of the wireless spectrum, and with little in the way of a track record the naysayers in some quarters seem to be becoming more vocal in their doubts.

Reading a MEX analysis of Danger, however, I was struck by the similarity in the potential models between the company and Google. Danger, the developer behind the perennially popular Sidekick devices on the T-Mobile network, takes its revenue not from the distinctive handsets (which are constructed by Sharp and sold in the US, UK and Germany) but entirely from software and services - the device/server platform which makes the Sidekick unique.

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