Apparently Google and T-Mobile announced the first phone that will use Google’s Android mobile platform. David Pogue has a great blog post about Android and the phone, so I won’t get into many details about that–essentially, it’s a T-Mobile Sidekick running Google’s software. It’s similar in many ways to the iPhone, but also comes with a tactile keyboard, an expansion slot, a removable battery, and voice dialing. It doesn’t quite have the iPod functionality, nor is the touch screen a multi-touch screen, and it has five buttons (not one), but it still has rich apps built-in on the phone, has 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, an over-the-air downloadable App Store and Music Store, and even adds a cool feature to Google Maps that has a built-in street view that automatically rotates itself as you rotate yourself standing somewhere.

However, some of the stuff coming in this phone, which will be called the G1, blows away some of the aspects of Apple’s offering. The Android platform is completely 100% open source; you can go download the source code today and change it without Google’s permission. The App Store is completely open and will not be censored at all by T-Mobile or Google; you could even add a Skype app on there without a worry. The phone can be unlocked after 90 days and will accept any cell service’s SIM card. These are some clear advantages over Apple’s iPhone offering and, combined with a pretty nice smartphone interface, will likely make the Android platform a very real competitor for Apple’s iPhone. (Unlike the Zune, which isn’t anywhere close to being viable iPod competition.)

In some ways, it almost feels as if it’s the 1980s all over again. Apple comes up with a bunch of innovations behind the Macintosh (okay, they got a lot of it from Xerox PARC, but let’s overlook that) and releases its first Mac in 1984, and the Mac OS is specifically tied to the Mac. Microsoft is a close partner with Apple on the Mac introduction and releases Word 1.0 alongside the Mac, but that the same time works on building their own operating system which borrows lots of ideas from the Mac OS, which will eventually become Windows, and which Microsoft will license out to multiple vendors. And the rest is history. Now, we have Apple coming up with a bunch of innovations to release the iPhone in 2007, and Google indeed is a partner in this product launch as it brings its technology into the awesome Google Maps implementation. But at the same time, Google develops its own mobile phone platform which borrows lots of ideas from the iPhone OS, which becomes Android, and which Google plans to make available for phones by multiple vendors (hopefully replacing Windows Mobile). The one obvious difference here is that Google Android is open source; Microsoft Windows wasn’t/isn’t.

Nevertheless, it feels to me like history is repeating itself. Will Google’s Android turn into the Windows of the smartphone world, against Apple’s Mac-based iPhone OS? More interestingly enough, will Apple make the same mistakes with the iPhone? They’re kind of in an oddball place right now, particularly given all of the anger and bad press that their App Store has been getting.

All I can say is that Google Android looks like it will become legitimate competition to Apple’s iPhone. However, I applaud Google for their efforts, both as a fervent supporter of open source and someone who believes that competition is a good thing because it keeps both competitors innovating. Perhaps if Google’s approach is successful, Apple will reconsider the whole “exclusive AT&T agreement” thing, become more open with their App Store, and do a few other things better. At this point, we’ll just have to wait and see…

Tags: Android, Apple, cell phone, competition, Google, iPhone, open source, smartphone, T-Mobile