The Google Phone rumour has been bubbling under for, well, years really! But over the last weeks talk about a handset which would be sold via Google themselves began to increase, until this weekend when everything from pictures, a new name and a potential conspiracy theory surrounding the phone hit the wires!
It all started with a Tweet from a Google employee who said they were ‘playing with the new Google phone’, a message accompanied by a picture of said phone. On the same day a Google blog post spoke about employees being given a new piece of ‘innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android’ to experiment with over the holiday period – a process they refer to as dogfooding.
Next came news from the Wall Street Journal, who backed up the previous rumours of Google readying a phone to be sold directly to consumers, with the extra news that it would be called the Google Nexus One and was being manufactured not by the Tyrell Corporation, but by HTC. It didn’t stop there either, as Engadget dug up some more pictures of the phone inside Google’s Picasa gallery, plus specification details started to circulate, including the phone running Android 2.1 and having a Snapdragon processor, a 5 megapixel camera and an OLED screen.
So, in the space of 48 hours we saw a huge amount of information spread around the Internet, but how much can be viewed as most likely factual? The phone is obviously real, but it’s also very similar to the HTC Passion pictured a month or so ago, with only the HTC branding missing and a position swap around of the touch-based navigation keys. The spec is also consistent with both the Passion and interestingly, the Bravo seen on the recently leaked HTC 2010 roadmap.
Things take a turn for the odd when noted mobile insider Eldar Murtazin got involved. He says that we’re all being led up the garden path on this one and not by Google or HTC, but by Apple! The phone pictured is indeed the Passion but it’s the 2.1 Android update that is being tested and it’s Apple throwing out all the other rumours to take the focus off the current tech-press darling, Motorola!
One thing is for sure, if Google are planning a phone and the January 2010 launch date is correct, we’re going to find out what’s real and what’s not soon enough!
