Google Hands Out Unlocked Android 2.1 ‘Google Phones’ to Some Employees

No idea about the tech specs or what it looks like yet, but the Googlers tweeting about it claim it’s beautiful. I’ve started getting hits to Daring Fireball with this user agent string, which I believe is this “Google Phone”:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD56C) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

With a few other slightly different build numbers mixed in. “ERD71F” is apparently the latest.

Also no idea when, how, or even if Google plans to sell this device to the public, and if so, whether the public model will be carrier unlocked. And credit where credit is due: my money says Arrington is going to be proven right on this one. I suppose this Google Phone can be squared with Andy Rubin’s comments at the end of October. Rubin shot down rumors of a Google-branded phone by saying, “We’re not making hardware. We’re enabling other people to build hardware.” You could parse that as being true, insofar as that the phone is apparently made by HTC.

Saturday, 12 December 2009