The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Google plans a series of announcements over the next two weeks about its mobile-phone software, which would bundle together most Google applications — search, maps, YouTube, instant-messaging — on a mobile platform.

The Google phone, often called the gPhone in quasi-mocking reference to the Apple iPhone, would not be an actual cell phone. Instead, it would be an operating system, hopefully free, that would run on several different models of cell phone.

The Journal reports:

The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications — among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email — that have already made their way onto some mobile devices. The most radical element of the plan, though, is Google’s push to make the phones’ software “open” right down to the operating system, the layer that controls applications and interacts with the hardware. That means independent software developers would get access to the tools they need to build additional phone features.

Google may have an uphill battle. Most mobile providers write or license specific applications that run only on phones running on their networks, and forbid the addition of third-party software. They often disable built-in smartphone Wi-Fi networking capabilities, forcing the use of their expensive data plans to access the Internet.

The rumor mill states that the Google phone would have few, if any, restrictions, and would support GPS tracking, Wi-Fi, high-speed “3G” cellular networking and a still and video camera, depending on the hardware. Google is expected to name T-Mobile—considered one of the most consumer-friendly of the US cellular carriers—as the gPhone’s mobile provider of choice.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 2:02 pm under Cell phones, Google.

Read more entries by Ema Kwiatkowski.
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