To test upcoming mobile apps and technologies internally

Dec 14, 2009 10:24 GMT  ·  By

The Google phone which the company denied so vehemently is very much a reality and it's coming to market early next year. Google has confirmed its existence though it claims it is only a testing device handed out to employees as a sort of mobile lab to run experimental apps and services. Everyone else though is having a field day with info on the device and we know that it will be called Nexus One and will be sold as an unlocked GSM phone, which in the US means it will work on T-Mobile and AT&T. In fact, the unlocked phone will apparently be carried by T-Mobile as well.

“At Google, we are constantly experimenting with new products and technologies, and often ask employees to test these products for quick feedback and suggestions for improvements in a process we call dogfooding (from "eating your own dogfood"). Well this holiday season, we are taking dogfooding to a new level,” Mario Queiroz, vice president, Product Management, writes on Google's mobile blog.

“We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it,” he added.

He goes on to say that because it is an internal project, there will be no further details at the moment. That didn't stop too many people from digging up a lot of info on the phone. It's built by HTC and shares many of the components and even the design with some of HTC's upcoming products. Despite many claims that it doesn't want to get into the hardware business and it won't compete with its partners, Google was apparently unsatisfied with what manufacturers had built using Android so far and decided to built its own phone to its exact specifications.

Besides the phone itself, Google's announcement is actually rather interesting in itself. With mobile Internet becoming more and more widespread, Google wants to make sure it conquers the market from the get go and isn't leaving anything to chance. The company is known for its extensive testing and runs quite a few experiments at the same time in the search engine and just about any of product. What's more, it constantly uses its employees as make shift testers, letting them use early iterations of its projects, like it did with Wave. By giving many of its employees a Google phone, it can run mobile experiments in a controlled environment and with a trusted audience.