This post was published 2 months 24 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is stirring the pot again. In a recent post, he states that the long theorized Googlephone is about to be released based on rumours from unnamed sources. A phone designed from the ground up by Google to be the perfect Android device, Arrington has this to say about it…

There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

He has no other details of the device but says that it will be created by a third party; maybe HTC, maybe LG, maybe Samsung, and will be released at the beginning of 2010.

I, however, am dubious….

Imagine if you will that a full year ago, Apple released the “Apple Phone” OS to third party manufacturers as open source. Over this year, the OS went through several versions and was embraced by all major vendors, most of whom had partnership deals with Apple. In fact several of those partners made Apple Phones their primary mobile focus, or the centerpiece of their smartphone line up.

Then, Apple releases the iPhone. Their “perfect” Apple Phone.

Things would get ugly, lawsuits would be filed, consumer confusion would set it…it would be a PR and business disaster for all involved.

Much the same thing would happen now from Google gut shooting such companies as HTC and LG and Motorola and Samsung, not to mention carriers such as Verizon by issuing a homegrown competitor to their own products.

Remember also that Google is no Apple. Apple was in the unique position of being both a hardware and a software company with decades of experience designing and producing devices completely in house. Google is a software company….not even that, they began as a search engine. Google is a services company that became wildly successful selling those services to third party customers. Successful enough to hire the staff to create their own browser, OS and Business applications to leverage their income producing elements like search and ads. Without industry customers to buy their adspace, search placement and services, Google becomes OpenOffice practically overnight.

Why would they suddenly produce a hardware device, their FIRST hardware device, that would be viewed as a direct attack on those customers that they have spent the last year selling on Android, and will soon need to support Chrome OS?

I am no fan of Google, but Brin and Schmidt are very very smart businessmen…a Googlephone would be very very stupid business.

I don’t think it is going to happen, despite what Arrington’s sources say.