[...] It is likely that T-Mobile will be the first U.S. carrier to bring a Google-powered cellphone to market. The two sides have been working together for several months to develop the specifications for a new device, which would be powered by the Google-backed Android open operating platform. The companies have declined to name the manufacturer of the phone, but most people in the industry suspect it is Taiwan’s HTC Corp. The effort puts T-Mobile ahead of Sprint Nextel Corp., the only other U.S. carrier among the 33 partners Google announced last week in its push for open operating platforms for cellphones.

[...]

As the discussions ramp up, the wireless carrier faces some challenges. It must ensure that the openness of the Android platform doesn’t compromise customers’ privacy or make their phones more susceptible to hacking and viruses. Android will make it possible for independent developers to create a range of new applications using information they normally don’t have access to, including a user’s geographic location and communications history. T-Mobile says it will screen third-party applications to protect customers’ security and privacy. [...] (Emphasis mine. -Alex)

If you remember, T-Mobile is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance (the governing body for Android). It’s disappointing that T-Mobile will be “protecting” customers by screening third-party applications. The robust home-brew apps for Android are important for many of people, especially those who would buy one of the initial offerings thanks to T-Mobile. I really wish T-Mobile would reconsider their stance on screening applications, but I’m not optimistic. I’m more hopeful that we’ll be able to flash our GPhones to use whichever Android build we’d like. That would be our heaven.

[ Read:  T-Mobile Wagers Deal With Google Is Worth the Risk - Wall Street Journal ]

[...] Google announced the release of their Android platform, which would be able to run Java applications on a mobile phone but it would also be released under the Apache License v2.

This raised more than one eyebrowse, and sure did make me raise mine: how did Google manage to get Sun to license off a platform that could very well kill their own?

Turns out, they didn’t: their move was even smarter than Sun’s.

Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals… and found the solution for the licensing problem. It’s called Dalvik and it’s the new name of Sun’s worst nightmares. [...]

I’ll spoil it for you: Dalvik is the name of Google’s Java-compatible custom virtual machine that runs the applications for GPhones. Stefano’s post is definitely worth reading if you’re interested in the licensing aspect of Android.

One of our goals in releasing the Android SDK is to unleash the creativity of application developers on the platform. We’d also like to get feedback early enough that we can make changes before the first Android-powered devices are available to the public. We plan to release updates to the SDK regularly which means that there will be additions and changes to the APIs and user experience — subscribe to this blog to stay up to date.

We’re really looking forward to seeing all the amazing applications that developers will create on an open mobile phone platform. In fact, you may even want to enter your application into the Android Developer Challenge — a USD$10 million challenge sponsored by Google to support and recognize developers who build great applications for the Android platform.

[YouTube]

The “GPhones” shown in the demo vid come in smartphone and touch-screen varieties. They also utilize 3G data speeds which offer quicker load times and more bandwidth for mobile internet access. The browsers are built on the WebKit framework (the same one used in Safari, Symbian OS, and KDE’s Konqueror browser). The Google maps API is used heavily, including street view on the phone.

In addition to the cool Google app, they also show off a demo of Quake running on OpenGL. So I think it’s fair to say it runs doom! The SDK is releasing today, so we’ll have more info soon.

From the Android developer’s page:

We will make available an early look at the Android™ SDK on November 12, 2007. We invite you to visit us again at this time to download the SDK.

We view Android as a “living” platform and look forward to working with the developer community to continuously enhance and enrich the platform.

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.

“These initial phones are not going to be for sale,” Benjamin Schachter, one of the analysts who worked on the report, said in a phone call earlier today. “These are going to be available for developers only to understand how the software works.” [Source: CNN/Fortune]

Write to us in the comments for this post if you’d like to receive an invitation to GrandCentral. Also, we’d love to hear from you on what you want in future postings on GPhoneholic. Your opinion means a lot to us.

Keep watching GPhoneholic this week. We’ll show you how switch only your voicemail to GrandCentral (so you could continue to use your current cellphone number). Nobody who calls you will ever have to even know that you switched any services.

Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API. [Jaiku | About Jaiku]

Of course, Jaiku seems to fit well into Google’s grand plan for the GPhone. Jaiku has already shown itself to be strong in the ways of mobile connectivity:

The most powerful instrument of social peripheral vision is your mobile phone. We’ve put in a special effort to create Jaiku Mobile, a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list. We modestly believe it is the best solution out there for seeing what your friends are up to. Currently Jaiku Mobile is available for phones based on the Nokia S60 software platform (see the list of compatible devices). [Jaiku | About Jaiku]

As with most Google acquisitions and product launches, registration for Jaiku is now by invite-only. Luckily, I signed up for Jaiku right after the initial launch of the service back in early April of this year. Right now we have 10 invites available, so the first 10 people who request one in the comments will receive an invitation. First post, first serve. So hurry while they still last!

1. It will run on Linux, and utilize Java virtual machines.
2. All apps are written in Java. This includes the ability to play media (even video).
3. The UI is similar to other mobile UIs. Again, it is written in Java and apparently quite responsive.
4. “There is a special browser which has pan-and-browse features that are common to modern browsers such as browsers for iPhone and Symbian phones. The entire browser is apparently written in Java. But then others have told us that the browser is based on the WebKit core, the same engine in Safari and in iPhone, and Google has been making optimizations to speed it up. This is one aspect of the Google Phone I am not sure about.” [I just pasted point 4 in its entirety, since there's a lot of room for paraphrasing errors here. -Ed]
5. Google has 3-5 devices running the mobile OS. All are QWERTY, and some say one model looks much like the T-Mobile Dash (which is a re-branded HTC ‘Excalibur’). The GPhone will likely be manufactured by HTC.

Hopefully this week’s string of leaks and rumors will continue throughout the. Some reports say Google will make a major announcement regarding the GPhone after Labor day (which was 3 days ago).

What do you think of these rumored features? Let us know in our comments!

[ GigaOM: Five Facts About Google Phone ]

One entrepreneur who has seen the Google phone prototype, but asked not to be named, described it as “simpler” and not as flashy as Apple’s iPhone.

He praised the phone’s ability to scroll through icons horizontally, making a number of different features easily accessible despite the limited screen space.

Another entrepreneur, who saw a prototype earlier this year, described three-dimensional, animated buttons on the screen. That prototype had a small QWERTY keyboard, like a Treo or a BlackBerry, rather than relying on a touch-screen, as the iPhone does.

Feel free to watch their video piece below:

[ Boston Globe: Introducing the Google Phone ]

Google Inc. has seen a spike in usage of its mobile services since May, partly offsetting the traditional summer slump in computer-based Web surfing for the first time, an executive said on Wednesday.

“We are seeing more and more mobile activity,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products, told a Web marketing conference in Silicon Valley.

Traffic to Google’s maps, e-mail and mobile searches on mobile phones and wireless handheld devices rose 35 percent between May and June. That reversed the previous annual pattern in which both mobile phone and computer use declined, the Google official said. [...]

[ Reuters: Google says mobile usage has surged this summer ]

So what exactly happened? The GrandCentral blog has an explanation:

[...] One of our smaller underlying carriers (which we had been using prior to the Google acquisition), which had been reliably providing similar services for years (and provided numbers and connectivity to lots of other providers)–sent us a notice that they’d be exiting certain markets and disconnecting some phone numbers in 30 days. This caught us by surprise and although we were not happy about this, there was no way we could stop them from doing this. [...]

[...] We’re doing everything we can to ensure that the carriers we’re now using, post-acquisition, are large, reliable, and committed to providing these services long term [...]

Via GigaOM. (I recommend reading GigaOM’s coverage. Also, I just added them to the GPhoneholic blogroll.)

In a recent interview with the NYTimes

During the interview Mr. Gates rejected the notion that Google could become a successful competitor in the smartphone software market, where Microsoft has about 10 percent market share. The Silicon valley search engine provider has been widely reported to be preparing to enter the cellphone market with its own software and a host of services springing from that software.

Microsoft’s chairman said it was unlikely that Google would be able to make inroads into the Microsoft’s share of market for mobile phone software.

“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?” he asked. “They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So, you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”

Again, the ability to create compelling software will determine the winners. “The phone is becoming way more software intensive,” he said. “And to be able to say that there’s some challenge for us in the phone market when its becoming software intensive, I don’t see that.”

Nobody expects Gates to be happy or cordial to a new behemoth competitor like Google in the mobile OS/software market. Mobile software expert Russell Beattie wrote a great response to Gates’s statement and gave an interesting analysis of the mobile software market and where it could go, which I recommend reading.

What are your thoughts? Let the world know in our comments…

From our “About Us” page:

“GPhoneholic started in August 2007, to gather and report all the interesting news about the rumored cellphone to be offered by Google which some have dubbed the “GPhone”. GPhoneholic is forged by a father-son duo who have a vicious “Google addiction”. Until there’s a cure, you have GPhoneholic.

If you’re feeling the itch, please add us to your bookmarks and/or feed reader so we may deliver your fix whenever you need it.”

My father and blog partner, Kent, will be posting stories too. Also, expect to see minor tweaks to the site over the next week while we add extra features and elements. We hope you enjoy our site, and welcome you to register and comment upon the discussions of stories we’ll be posting!