Especially if it came with a slideout qwerty... vertical or horizontal.

Not really. The Android platform would be a lot easier to develop for right off the bat if there was a standard gPhone. With the iPhone you had to wait for someone to hack it, build new hacks to get around the relocking from Apple, and now they are finally going to allow approved 3rd party apps. Their main advantage is strong hardware that is standard across their single phone. It's basically always Apple's strong suit. They limit the hardware so they can build a more specialized OS that is locked to the hardware and that they control. If Google made an iPhone-class phone that was also open and not tied to a carrier, it would be a much better device than the iPhone by far.

I'm all ok with releasing Android first. But the time frame.... total nonsense. When Windows Mobile 7 comes out, I KNOW I'll forget something called "Android" was even suggested.

Unless a Christmas miracle happens and WM7 isn't the next-gen OS is was meant to be.

Google should real make a gPhone. if the don't want to spezification for the Handset Makers.

"Google in the hardware business" - I have had that same impulse, and yeah it would probably accelerate an actual physical phone, but at what price? The overhead to start making physical objects is huge, and Google hasn't been very successful in the past with their search sever:

So, let's give the feet dragging carriers a few more months to face reality or die a horrible Darwinistic death. Remember market forces will always fill a profitable void ( American electronics and cars R.I.P. ). If the evil carriers want to maintain their ability to bind their ( awful ) content with their service and their hardware, they'll have to release an Android handset - if they don't, someone else will.

*Weird to think about. Imagine if when you bought a new Sony TV it only let you watch Sony content ( Sony owns Columbia movie studio and Viacom ) and only let you use the Playstation - No xbox, no ABC or ESPN, if you wanted to watch ontent from a different providers, you'd have to buy another TV ( !!! )

...That's what the carriers want to be able to continue to do!

The problem is, Google thinks it has to play it like Microsoft and Intel has been doing it for decades. Google doesn't want to be a hardware manufacturer, they figured they'd rather stay neutral and provide the platforms and help companies optimize the platform on reference designs based on each of the ARM processor architechtures out there, be it Texas Instruments DaVinci, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Freescale, Samsung, Nvidia Tegra, Marvell Xscale and others.

Google is probably thinking the same thing for when they target Google Android to laptops (probably within the next few months), Google wouldn't want to release a 100 dollar Google Laptop themselves, they'll rather help other companies on reference designs and sit and watch those other companies try to make profit margins and feed the intermediaries as the established consumer electronics industry is used to.

Somehow it seems Google is afraid to bet on making hardware themselves and sell it themselves. They might think they shouldn't risk making the established consumer electronics industry mad at them. "You don't try to compete with your own partners" they must be thinking. Though I think the best solution ultimately might be a single mass produced 100 dollar Pocket Google Android device and a 100 dollar Google Android Laptop, each fully open source while still running all software patented codecs and features needed, each using VOIP and other free and disruptive IP technologies and built around giving the users the maximum control. Google could thus mass manufacture the Pocket and Laptop Android device and sell them like OLPC does, like a non-profit. Cause Google shouldn't try to make a profit on selling hardware even if they manufacture and sell it themselves, Google makes more money when more people use the Internet.

Thats just my opinion which might not make any sense.

Note: this opinion is not of my own, there is a section of my brain that creates random opinions on the fly thus i have no control of whatever that was written here today

Windows Mobile 7 (with all the next-gen fluidity and UI) will be all over the mobile market, and iPhone 2.0 will have a million 3rd party apps. What will Android have by then? Nothing.

Too late. They underestimated the time factor.