Google is finally lifting the veil of secrecy from one of the company's worst kept secrets: Google has been working on a cellphone platform. In the early days of gPhone speculation, rumors were flying that Google was going to launch its answer to the iPhone: a piece of hardware running custom software. Now we know that Google has instead developed a software platform for mobile phones that allows phone makers and software developers to do more with cellphones. And of course, to make sure those phones connect easily to Google services like search, Gmail, Google Maps, and so on.

Google today is announcing Android, the mobile OS and the Open Handset Alliance. Google will be releasing the first version of the software development kit for Android on November 12.

Android is built on Linux and features a virtual machine designed for memory and resource optimization. Since the OS is built on an open source foundation, we could eventually see thousands of independent developers creating or porting third party applications to the mobile operating system. Think there are plenty of applications for your Windows Mobile, Palm, or Symbian phone? If Android catches on, we'd love to see developers port every single one of those apps, plus a few Linux goodies like OpenOffice.org or at least AbiWord.

In other words, Android is sort of the anti-iPhone. While Apple released an amazing new OS for a single handset, Android will be able to run on any number of phone models. And while Apple has yet to make an SDK available for third party iPhone development (although one is coming), Google will launch an Android SDK before a single phone even runs the OS.