Highly anticipated Google phone coming in January who will want one?

Google phone coming in January 2010 - may not resemble final product

You and I will of course.

Friday afternoon the buzz in Mountain View, California and on the Internet was the Google phone, dubbed by one Google employee “iPhone on steroids.”

Google handed out an unknown number of pre-release phones to employees on a non-disclosure basis but the word is out. Employees are tweeting their excitement about this new phone.

It has a touch screen and a trackball which makes it half iPhone and half Blackberry.

It runs Google’s Android OS and will incorporate some of the new toys that Google has been developing like GIS Street view. It will know where you are and give you the view.

Another new application will let you point the phone at a store and the store’s information will appear on the screen, such as menu’s, products, pricing, hours of business.

Engadget is of two minds: the Google phone is real and it’s a joke.

If the device is out in the wild in such a big way, an end of the year press release wouldn’t shock us either; of course, it’s entirely possible that this is going to end up becoming the Android Dev Phone 1’s true successor or an elaborate prank on Google’s part in response to the rumors that have been building steam over the past couple weeks (they’re crafty and they have a sense of humor — it could happen). Anyhow, check out one of the tweet-tears after the break, and stay tuned for more info!

Google phone - might look like this

Google is playing coy with their Google Mobile Blog

An Android dogfood diet for the holidays Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:58 AM

At Google, we are constantly experimenting with new products and technologies, and often ask employees to test these products for quick feedback and suggestions for improvements in a process we call dogfooding (from “eating your own dogfood”). Well this holiday season, we are taking dogfooding to a new level.

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details. We hope to share more after our dogfood diet.

Posted by Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management

Techcrunch have details, details, and more details

It will be branded Google and sold by Google as an unlocked phone, which could change everything. The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google. It seems to be a tailored version of the HTC Passion or the related HD2. It will be called the Google Phone and will launch in early January, 2010. It won’t be sold by any one carrier, but instead will be an unlocked GSM phone. In the U.S., that means T-Mobile and possibly AT&T, whose exclusivity deal with the iPhone is about to run out. It will be running Android 2.1

The phone is “really, really fast,” says someone who has seen one in action. It runs on a Snapdragon chip, has a super high-resolution OLED touchscreen, is thinner than the iPhone, has no keyboard, and two mics. The mic on the back of the phone helps eliminate background noise, and it also has a “weirdly” large camera for a phone. And if you don’t like the touchscreen keyboard, a voice-to-text feature is supposed to let you dictate emails and notes by speaking directly into the phone.

Could Google crowd Apple and Microsoft in one fell swoop? We can’t wait to see.