Google makes right call with gPhone

WIRED:Google, in co-operation with Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile, announced the first product using the search engine company's own mobile phone operating system, Android.

Techies have known about the "gPhone" (as it has been called) for almost a year, and have been working with prototype software to create applications for it - but this is the first time a real Google Phone has been put on sale for ordinary users.

Costing from $179 (€125) with a two-year plan, the T-Mobile G1 phone has a camera, accelerometer and GPS to detect location and angles, supports 3G and slower data protocols, and can browse the web, play music, show maps and download additional applications.

As far as specifications go, it's pretty much on par with the iPhone - except that it has a keyboard, and a less minimalistically stylish interface.

But it's not the hardware that sets the gPhone and the iPhone apart, it's the underlying philosophy.

Apple's iPhone is just open enough to allow developers other than Apple to create programs for it - and no more.

Coders need to sign a strict non-disclosure agreement, and rely on Apple's seal of approval before users can even touch their applications.

Everything goes through Apple: even mobile phone providers must jump through hoops before they are allowed to support Steve Jobs's precious vision.

Google, in the same spirit as its other works, is so open as to almost seem naively idealistic.

Android, the operating system software for the phone, plus its valuable source code, is open source - provided by Google for anyone to use and improve.

In fact, Google has gone to great lengths to free the gPhone from anyone's control. Programs for the G1 and other Android phones are written in something that looks remarkably like Java, Sun's programming language, but which Google refuses to call Java.

Google has re-written everything underlying Java in-house.

That allows them to ignore Sun's licensing restrictions on its mobile edition of Java, while remaining compatible and familiar to hundreds of thousands of programmers.

It's often hard to quantify exactly how much consumer benefit, if any, there is to glean from this openness. It gains geek cred points, certainly, and definitely represents the "Google way of doing things".

But as Apple has shown, an iron grip on almost every element of a computer product's design also avoids the Frankenstein-like hodgepodges of the more open PC world.

By refusing to share, they can impose a consistency on interface and experience of which PC owners can only dream.

But Android can be taken, tweaked, and resold by mobile phone companies.

The open-source licence it is provided under is not reciprocal, so mobile phone manufacturers could even add their own "special sauce" and be under no obligation to release those secrets to the rest of the world.

Apple demands that code running on the iPhone pass its supposedly rigorous inspection. Anyone can run anything on Android. Great if you need that obscure application: less great if you end up with the first Android virus.

Which direction will the future of mobile phones go? Well, from where they are now, they can really only go towards a more open future. Before either Apple or Google entered this market, phones were locked far more tightly than any personal computer.

And it didn't matter what software was running on them, either. Both Symbian and Windows Mobile, the two main smartphone operating systems, allow third-party programs to run on them. But their openness was not a selling point until now.

An open phone gives away the control that mobile phone companies have held over their customers, but it doesn't hand it to anyone else.

Given the choice between the iPhone, which is loved by customers but hands control of multiple layers of the smartphone revenue model to Apple, or a generic open phone, providers have strong incentives to go for the open phone.

Sure, they may lose some power over their users. No longer can they tell them what software to run, or what homepage they will see when they start up their machine. But neither will anyone else. Better to have no one in control than a competitor like Apple.

Or at least that's what they think. Another company is gambling on its ability to take the lion's share of any open network - and that's Google. Considering its achievements on the definitive open network, the internet, they may be on to something.