Google Confirms Plans to Release Its Own Smartphone

SOURCE : REUTERS

Google Confirms Plans to Release Its Own Smartphone

Mon Dec 14, 2009 10:20am EST

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At last, the Googlephone has appeared. Forget the Droid, the G1 and all those other Android wannabees. Google will begin to sell its own reference Android 2.1 handset, designed by Google, made by hardware partner HTC, and called the Nexus One. The phone will be sold online by Google itself.

The Nexus One will, crucially, be sold unlocked, giving Google complete control over the hardware and software with no pesky carrier interference. Even the iPhone, which has had almost unprecedented autonomy in its functionality is still constrained by carriers: AT&T’s anti-tethering paranoia is a good example.

Although not yet officially announced, Google has coyly admitted that the phone is real and will be on sale early in the new year. In fact, it has provided the handset to its employees in order to test it out in the wild. The Google Mobile Blog explains, somewhat cryptically:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details. We hope to share more after our dogfood diet.

The phone is already in use. Nerdy John Gruber of Daring Fireball found this user agent string in his site’s logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD56C) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

It makes sense to identify yourself as Mobile Safari, if only to get proper mobile Webkit pages served to you.

Characteristically, and in contrast to Apple’s secrecy, photos of the Googlephone are already being posted openly by Googlers, or being handed to their friends. The picture above, posted on Twitpic by blogger Cory O’Brien, shows the handset (taken on an iPhone and with a BlackBerry in the background). According to O’Brien, “Google Phone = iPhone + a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android”.

The hardware specs are also leaking. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says that the Nexus will run on Qualcomm’s speedy Snapdragon chip, sport an OLED display, be thinner than the iPhone (with no physical keyboard) and feature two microphones along with a “weirdly large” camera.

Those hoping to get an iPhone-caliber phone on Verizon are out of luck. The Nexus will be a GSM phone, which means T-Mobile and AT&T in the US. Worse, if you do opt for AT&T, your data connection could be EDGE-only. Gruber again, from Twitter.

The bummer I’m hearing about Nexus One: it’s GSM and unlocked, but on T-Mobile’s 3G band, so it works on AT&T but EDGE-only.

According to the Media Memo blog at the Wall Street Journal, the choice to use GSM was prompted by Verizon’s refusal to carry the Nexus. Verizon already sells the Android-based Droid, but this odd decision looks like a repeat of the one made when the carrier turned down the iPhone.

This may turn out to be a Zune-like move, where Microsoft alienated hardware makers by ignoring PlaysForSure in favor of its own new DRM scheme. Or the Nexus could be a light that burns twice as bright as all the existing confusion of Android handsets combined, thus building a brand that can rival the iPhone. Either way, we won’t have to wait for long to see. The Nexus should be on sale in early January, and if these last two days are any indication, then Googlers will have “leaked” all the hardware and software well before the launch.

An Android dogfood diet for the holidays [Google Mobile Blog]

Photo credit: Cory O’Brien