What gPhone?

Miguel Heft of The New York Times has some interesting info about Google's so-called gPhone:Google is not building a phone. The company is building a mobilephone operating system, as well as what technologists call a “referenceplatform,” a set of specifications for how hardware makers would builda phone based on that software. Google is also beefing up its mobileapplications, and it is believed to be creating software to ensurethose apps run smoothly on as many phones as possible. In a way, that looks a lot like what Microsoft does with WindowsMobile and Symbian does with its mobile operating system. Yet no onereally talks about the “Microsoft Phone.” Rather, there’s the MotorolaQ running Windows Mobile, the Palm Treo running Windows Mobile and soforth. So maybe speaking of the Google Phone is a bit of misnomer.Maybe we should simply be talking about the, well, we don’t yet knowwho will make these phones, but say if it were HTC, we would talk aboutthe HTC phone running Google’s mobile Linux. Google could decide to brand or co-brand phones with somemanufacturers. In such a case, there really would be a Google Phone. Itwould also be the first time that Google would be pushing a consumerdevice, and as some people have noted, it could create conflicts forGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt, who sits on the board of iPhone maker Apple. I'm intrigued by this because I'm currently a heavy consumer of Google online services (Gmail, Google Calendar, and PicasaWeb). Obviously, Microsoft currently offers a number of end-to-end (the ends being "Windows," the Web, and "Windows Mobile") solutions for both consumers (Windows Live) and business users (Exchange/Outlook/OWA) and may thus seem like an obvious choice. It's honestly not that obvious. While most of what Microsoft does is excellent, I still prefer Gmail over Hotmail by a wide margin (functionality and performance) though the company gets credit for Outlook Connector, which is first rate. Calendaring