Exec confirms Google Phone

The head of Google in Spain and Portugal has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. "Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone," Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish news Web site Noticias.com.

Google spokespeople in the US have repeatedly declined to comment on rumours of a Google Phone, but the smoke has been rising lately. Earlier this month, Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners wrote in his blog that an inside source told him the Google Phone will be a BlackBerry-like device running C++ at the core with an operating system bootstrap and optimised Java and that it would offer VoIP.

Rumours also circulated that Google and Samsung were building a phone, code-named 'Switch', Simeonov said, and his posting includes what he claims is a leaked photo of the device. That wouldn't be so far fetched as Google and Samsung announced a partnership in January to bundle mobile versions of Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail on certain Samsung phones. Late last year, the rumour was that France Telecom Group's mobile-telephony division Orange was in discussions with Google.

Plus, Google has on its payroll Andy Rubin, the founder of handheld device maker Danger who later started Android, a mobile-software maker that Google bought in 2005. Google also acquired mobile-applications company Reqwireless and it secretly acquired a company called Skia, whose first product is a portable graphics engine that renders 2D graphics on handhelds.

The Real Google Phone

Andy Rubin has a team of about 100 people at Google working on the Google Phone. So people have been paying attention. Andy was the founder of Danger and later Android, which he sold to Google in August of 2005. Andy is a systems guy and so it’s a good bet that he’s working on an OS for the famed Google Phone.

To help the cause, in July 2005 Google also acquired Reqwireless, a mobile applications company that has apparently played a role in developing the suite of Google mobile apps.

What is more or less unknown is that later in 2005, Google bought Skia. (That acquisition is not part of even the Wikipedia list of Google acquisitions and there is very little information about this on the Net.) Skia was founded by Mike Reed, a device software guru who’d built a very tight vector-based presentation engine. I looked the company as a potential investment in August 2005, a few months before Google got them. The demos I saw were pretty compelling given the early stage of the technology at the time and Mike certainly knew what he was doing.