We’ve been speculating on this for some time, but now the really big dogs in the media have picked up on it.

Andy Beal let out a great big yawn over the Wall Street Journal’s piece on connecting a Google Phone with carriers. No real details have emerged that haven’t been mentioned previously:

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.

Interesting for the hardcore geek crowd who love to build fun stuff on new toys like the ethereal Google Phone. We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: a Google Phone proposition simply is not interesting without knowing more about the underlying network to carry the service. If the gPhone ends up being just another piece of hardware in T-Mobile’s lineup, or anyone else’s, it’s just not going to be a big deal.

If it ends up being available at the time Sprint launches its Xohm WiMAX service, and operates on an ad-supported model, that will be the real achievement. We still think Google has enough resources to run a network of its devising, but if they were to help Sprint offset some of the $5 billion in costs to set up Xohm, and provide the gPhone hardware to run on top of it, that would be the real story.

But that potential headline grabber looks like it won’t be a reality until sometime in 2008, if it happens at all.

Posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 10:24 am. Permalink