In search of the Google phone

news analysis Searching for the Google phone is a lot like hunting for Bigfoot.

Rumors of a Google phone, or "Gphone" for short, have circulated since late 2004 and hit a fever pitch over the last few months, according to a handy timeline on the Search Engine Land blog.

There's speculation that Google might drop some hints at its analyst day on Wednesday, but until now Google executives and spokespeople have refused to comment, or even confirm, if Gphone is the name of a product many believe the search giant to be working on.

Often, where there's smoke there's fire. And what do the smoke signals--and Google patents--say? Unlike Apple's iPhone, the Gphone probably won't be an actual hardware device. Instead, it's more likely to be a bundle of software and supporting infrastructure that allows a phone manufactured by someone else to access Google services, experts say.

Google will probably partner with France Telecom's mobile-telephony division Orange and KDDI in Japan, says Stephen Arnold, author of The Google Legacy and a new book, Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. Arnold has researched Google's patents and found more than a dozen that relate to mobile telephony.

"There is going to be a Google phone as a reference device, probably more than one," Arnold told CNET News.com. "They will hook into the Googleplex to deliver functionality that ranges from 'search without search' (information that anticipates what someone may be looking for), to mapping and calendar services. Google is positioned to move different ways in response to market behavior."

This image shows a diagram from a patent filed June 30, 2005 and published October 12, 2006, called "Non-Standard Locality-Based Text Entry." The invention would allow an English speaker, for example, to use the keypad of any mobile phone to enter Chinese characters, according to Google patent scrutinizer Stephen Arnold.
Credit: US Patent and Trademark Office/Shumeet Baluja