There was yet another false alarm on the route to market for the Google Phone this week, with multiple sources, including major US newspapers saying that it would be announced on Tuesday, instead it is now expected to be launched in the next few weeks.
However more and more people agree on what it is, or rather has to be, and that it is not a handset at all, nor even an operating system, but an environment or platform for putting on a multitude of different hardware, likely to be Linux and proprietary handsets.
If it is announced in two weeks, more or less everyone agrees that phones with it on won’t come to market before mid-2008.
The Wall Street Journal was one of the US papers that thought it would come any day, and says that insiders have told it that the system will bring together several existing applications, including Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail – surely not.
Our take is that even Google will need to announce it with a tame handset maker which might easily be a top manufacturer like Motorola or Samsung but which might just as easily be an Asia Pacific manufacturer – why not ZTE or someone with Chinese influence. Whatever, it won’t be Nokia, which now sees all thing Google as its mobile service rival. We also think Google will offer the architecture for free, because most of what it does is free, and that it would then take its revenues out of controlling adverts on all or some of the Google services delivered to the handset, and that some of this advertising revenue might be used to underwrite the cost of the device or even the network charges.