It’s a well known fact that Google has great ambitions when it comes to the mobile phone market. For starters, it plans to have one of the major mobile operating systems available on the market, and we've seen the Android 1.0 platform launched last year, along with G1, while this year we'll have Android 2.0, and we also learned that there will be a 3.0 version next year.

Up until now, we were pretty sure that the company would leave others to take on the hardware side of the business. And yet, now we learn that Google is patenting its own smartphone design. It seems that the company’s patent design for a mobile slider handset is not quite new, as it was filed back in August 2007, and it is called “Electronic device with hinge mechanism.”

There is no explanation on how the Google phone design has come to life, whether it is the work of one of its engineers or the representation of a phone reference design that Google tried to patent before it considered going only for the software side of business. On the other hand, the Google smartphone doesn't seem to feature any new technologies, as all the things that can be seen there have already been implemented in today's handsets one way or another.

For what it's worth, the patent seems to display work that has been done around the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007. What the company could have been looking for at that time is a device that would feature multi-directional sliding keyboard, coupled with a big display meant to facilitate Internet browsing, as well as the use of Google's services.

At that time, there weren't many devices to include these features, so it would be explainable why Google would have felt the need to step in. Those interested in the patent app can download it from UnwiredView.