Rumors about a Google phone have been flying for months. And since they started around the time that Apple was releasing its game-changing iPhone, it should come as no surprise that we all started to get the idea that Google might get into the hardware game and release a gPhone handset featuring Google software.But according to the New York Times, while Google has developed a few prototype handsets for internal testing, what the company is really working on is a mobile operating system. Or to put it another way, what the company is really working on is a way to serve up advertisements on your mobile device.
Google will offer up its OS to hardware manufacturers, so perhaps one day you'll be able to get a Treo running PalmOS, Windows Mobile, or a Google operating system. The OS will be Linux-based and will include Google applications including mail, directions, possibly a web browser, and probably some sort of mobile version of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
