The Google Phone Cometh

Tech­nol­ogy blog Techcrunch.com has long held the ban­ner that there will one day come a “Google Phone” — a phone branded by Google itself, bear­ing the Android oper­at­ing sys­tem, not offered in part­ner­ship with a wire­less provider.

This is sort of big news. See, cur­rently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wire­less provider, like AT&T or Ver­i­zon Wire­less or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, mean­ing that the wire­less com­pany will be sub­si­diz­ing the cost of the phone to you, mak­ing it a cheaper pur­chase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year com­mit­ment to wire­less ser­vice.

This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in part­ner­ship with AT&T, but was ini­tially sold unsub­si­dized — mean­ing that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for ser­vice with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, sub­si­dized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year com­mit­ment on ser­vice.

When Google launched their Android oper­at­ing sys­tem for hand­helds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hard­ware busi­ness, that they were in the OS busi­ness to make phones bet­ter across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not mak­ing hard­ware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other peo­ple to build hard­ware.’”

Tech­ni­cally, that may still be true. What came out of Moun­tain View this week­end is a report that Google has handed out a new hand­set dubbed the “Nexus One” to employ­ees at the Google hol­i­day party. It runs the lat­est unre­leased ver­sion of the Android oper­at­ing sys­tem and is man­u­fac­tured by HTC, long-time man­u­fac­tur­ing part­ner to big wire­less. Note, it’s not man­u­fac­tured by Google.

Sub­tle. Very sub­tle.

What Google said pub­licly is this:

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.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be some­what dif­fer­ent. We’re hear­ing that this new phone will hit the mar­ket in Jan­u­ary of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smart­phone mar­ket with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM net­work. That means cus­tomers would be able to choose their wire­less provider, com­pat­i­ble with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfor­tu­nately for Ver­i­zon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indi­cate that it is much bet­ter look­ing, and there appears to be no bat­tery door to fall off. Tumul­tuous times indeed.

Buy­ing advice? Jan­u­ary 2010 is right around the cor­ner. If you’re hot for a smart­phone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hope­fully doing with their Google phone is fix­ing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosys­tem. The Google phone will allow cus­tomers to buy closer to the cen­ter of the ecosys­tem, with access to an appli­ca­tion store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re div­ing into the Google­verse, you might as well dive into the deep end.