Who's Calling?

For the past few weeks Andy Rubin has been reading a lot about the so-called "G-phone," the mobile phone supposedly being built within Google that would take on the iPhone. He's even seen photos published that purport to spot people testing prototypes of this G-phone in the wild. "It was pretty funny," he says, "Because there is no G-phone. The press just made it up."

Rubin knows this because he's the lead guy on what Google actually is doing to create a new kind of mobile phone: putting together all the pieces and software so that others can build devices that work in a standard way, with cool features and flashy software that any developer can write.

This "Android" project, announced Monday, is a collaboration between Google and 33 partners in the semiconductor, software, handset and network carrier industries. (Android, by the way, was the name of a company Rubin started that Google bought in 2005.) "It's everything you need to build a phone," says Rubin. The first ones are expected in the first half of 2008 (which in tech terms means close to the end of June). Look for them from partners like Samsung, Motorola and LG, running on U.S. networks Sprint and T-Mobile. (Internationally, there's China Mobile, Japan's KDDI and DoCoMo, and Telecom Italia.) Chipmakers involved include Intel, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Broadcom and GPS specialist SiRF.

What will be different about a Google phone? Clearly, it will make good use of the Internet. It also will be able to run specialized programs that take advantage of connectivity and different kinds of mobile handsets. (Android can work on different form factors, from iPhone-like slabs-yes, touch-screen controls are supported-to traditional flip phones.) The people who write software applications will be able to directly access the computer chips that are the phone's brains, allowing for speed and efficiency. Rubin says that the Android operating system, a souped-up and mobilized version of the open-source Linux system (sorry, Microsoft) is a "mobile mashup platform" that allows applications to share information. For instance, if you wrote a "friends" application to keep track of your buddies, you may be able to make use of Google Maps to see where they are. Google itself is working on several applications, he says, including a "rocking" (says Rubin) Web browser, the first the company has produced. And since eBay is a founding partner of the alliance, one can expect a custom app to let mobile users track their bids on Hawaiian shirts and laptop batteries.

So why is Google developing a cookbook for mobile phones and then giving it away, open-source style? "We're about organizing the world's information in an accessible way," says Rubin, who once worked for Apple but is best known for developing the Sidekick communicator. "There are 3 billion cell phones in the world, used by a billion and a half people-mostly people who don't have a good Internet experience on their phones. This technology fills that gap."

Another reason undoubtedly is that Android will be a custom-made staging ground for the increasing number of Web-based applications that Google is producing. One can also expect Google search to be a huge component in these devices. (It's up to carriers and handset makers to decide what goes on, but it's reasonable to expect that they will choose the Google apps, which not only are customer-pleasing but are typically free.) Every Android will be an ambassador for the Google way. Think of Google as involved in a perpetual game of Risk with its competitors: becoming a critical force in the mobile world is like moving a lot of your pieces into Asia.