The tech web is going crazy right now with the announcement this morning of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance and their Android mobile OS. Right now the OHA is 34 members strong. A handful of partners in the OHA (including executives from Google, HTC, T-Mobile, Motorola) just finished a conference call to announce the phone and take questions from the press. As we learn more from this call, we will keep you up-to-date.

It’s confirmed that the Linux kernel will be the base of the phone. Google will be applying the Apache open-source license to the SDK, which doesn’t have a “copyleft” clause in it. This means developers can release software under the license without having to disclose the source if they don’t want to. This obviously helps attract more big businesses to develop software for the phone.

We at GPhoneholic have long been suspicious that the long-rumored “GPhone” will not necessarily be a branded Google handset in the traditional sense. Google’s bread-and-butter is in software. The Android announcement confirms that Google is working primarily on making the phone’s software while partnering with 33 other companies to help them accomplish a full spectrum of Android deployment. Right now there is no official “GPhone”, but rather the beginning of perhaps hundreds of GPhones manufactured and developed by the OHA.

We can expect to see the first Android-based phones in the second half of 2008. The SDK will be available starting November 12th, 2007, which is just one week away at the time of this writing.

Android will apparently include a robust HTML browser. And we shouldn’t expect to see it driven by Google adsense ads at any level other than the website a user may be visiting. Of course, this is still up to the individual carriers, since they have full control over what goes into the Android OS that they roll into their phones.

The minimum requirements for an Android-based phone are somewhere near a 200MHz ARM9 processor. Screen sizes can be either large or small, and keyboards can either be traditional 1-9 or QWERTY styles. And of course, there’s no reason why Android won’t work with the new 700 MHz frequency spectrum which will be up for grabs next year.

The UI is said to be very slick. Hopefully we’ll see a preview of what it looks like on November 12th.

Check out this video from Google on the announcement of Android:

This is a very exciting time for us at GPhoneholic. We’ve been covering Google mobile phone rumors for over 2 months here, and now it looks like the “GPhone” is finally going to become well-known with the public. I imagine we’ll be covering Android news much like a Windows Mobile or iPhone blog would for their respective operating systems of choice. Is this name of our blog still relevant? I’d say it’s good enough for now. Of course, we’re always open to suggestions.