Nine ways of looking at a Google phone
The long-rumored gPhone has surfaced, but no one can agree on what it means
The purported Google phone. Photo: Cory O'Brien
Google (GOOG) announced on its mobile blog Saturday what dozens of staffers had already leaked: the company has given employees around the world free handsets running its Android mobile operating system. The idea, according to the official report, is to have Google's own people test various advanced features and offer feedback to the company's designers — a process known in the business as "dogfooding" (as in "eating your own dogfood").
Not surprisingly, given Google's financial clout and the power it wields over the Internet, the experiment has launched a storm of speculation about what it means. As we sort through the theories, we count at least nine ways of looking at the Google phone:
The Mythical Gphone
Here's a fun exercise.
Do a Google search on the words "Gphone" and "two weeks." You'll get hundreds of thousands of hits, most of them saying pretty much the same thing: Google (GOOG) is about to unveil a cellphone that will change the world forever, or at least kill the Apple (AAPL) iPhone.
We've been skeptical all along, in part because Google has never shown any expertise — or interest — in building consumer electronics. And in part because the due date for the mythical Gphone was always shifting, always just a couple weeks or days away.
Today, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal — an assurance echoed by a hundred newsites that should have known better — was the day.
Did we get a Google phone? No.
What we got instead was a press release, a conference call, some self-indulgent videos, and a memo from Andy Rubin, the putative designer of the mythical phone (and hero of an adoring profile in The New York Times over the weekend), confirming what the naysayers have been saying all along: Google is not and will not be in the business of building phones.
What it's offering — and trying to sell to the people who actually build the phones — is an operating system and some tools for writing cellphone applications. It's a worthy enterprise and I wish them well. What it is not — as they are the first to say — is a Gphone.
