Technology blog Techcrunch.com has long held the banner that there will one day come a “Google Phone” — a phone branded by Google itself, bearing the Android operating system, not offered in partnership with a wireless provider.

This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wireless provider, like AT&T or Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, meaning that the wireless company will be subsidizing the cost of the phone to you, making it a cheaper purchase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year commitment to wireless service.

This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in partnership with AT&T, but was initially sold unsubsidized — meaning that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for service with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, subsidized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year commitment on service.

When Google launched their Android operating system for handhelds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hardware business, that they were in the OS business to make phones better across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not making hardware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other people to build hardware.’”

Technically, that may still be true. What came out of Mountain View this weekend is a report that Google has handed out a new handset dubbed the “Nexus One” to employees at the Google holiday party. It runs the latest unreleased version of the Android operating system and is manufactured by HTC, long-time manufacturing partner to big wireless. Note, it’s not manufactured by Google.

Subtle. Very subtle.

What Google said publicly is this:

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.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be somewhat different. We’re hearing that this new phone will hit the market in January of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smartphone market with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM network. That means customers would be able to choose their wireless provider, compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfortunately for Verizon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indicate that it is much better looking, and there appears to be no battery door to fall off. Tumultuous times indeed.

Buying advice? January 2010 is right around the corner. If you’re hot for a smartphone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hopefully doing with their Google phone is fixing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosystem. The Google phone will allow customers to buy closer to the center of the ecosystem, with access to an application store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re diving into the Googleverse, you might as well dive into the deep end.

Just to follow up the Pre article from earlier this morning, if I were walking in to a Sprint store for a phone, which is unlikely for me, but if I were going to do it, I’d be waiting for the HTC Hero.

Widely praised by reviewers as well as users who can already buy it in Europe, the Hero could give Sprint a much-needed boost. This will mark the second recent attempt—following the sale of the Palm Pre—by Sprint to use an exclusive deal for an anticipated phone in hopes of stemming a long stretch of losses.

via Sprint to sell Android phone in October.

I’ve now actually touched a Palm Pre. I was walking through Best Buy and, for the first time, they had a functioning model on the floor — not the plastic brick placeholder they usually have around. I stood there poking around at it for about 20 minutes and walked away with a few quick impressions.

1. You never quite know where you are.
There’s no doubt that the interface is quite slick. It feels peppy and rich and — believe it or not — it’s more gooey than the iPhone interface. Maybe that’s just me not being used to it, but I really did want to lick this thing; it’s that much like candy. That said, even after 20 minutes, you never quite know where you are on the thing. Was I in an app? Was I cycling through processes? Where did the calendar go? It seems like there was just so much going on at any one time, that I was never able to focus on where I was, what I was trying to do. In this respect, this is a de-evolution from the Palm OS that I had grown to love with my first Palm III.

2. Cheap.
The thing squeeked in my hand. Every time I slid the keyboard out, I got that cringe-inducing plastic squelch. Maybe it’s designed for smaller, more delicate paws, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was going to fall apart on me. I imagine this is the feeling with many of these sliding-keyboard jobs, and I don’t have experience with many, but this one just felt cheap.

3. Fixed Keyboards.
The last two+ years with my iPhone have broken me from the physical keyboard thing. It took some time, and I don’t think I ever really took note of it before the Pre, but it turns out that I hate tiny phone keyboards now. They don’t change when my needs change. They don’t get all wide and wonderful when I turn the phone into landscape orientation. They don’t pop-up little markers telling me which key I just typed. There are just so many don’ts that I suddenly find it hard to believe they included a hard keyboard at all. The keys were just too small to get any work done, and too inflexible for the needs of the applications on the device itself.

4. Polish.
There is an entry video on the Pre that follows this shiny ball of light floating about a landscape, introducing you to all things Pre-wonderful. The video is presented in portrait mode, or “tallscreen”, so it looks normal as you’re looking at the phone for the first time. When you touch the screen, the video controls fade in, allowing you to scrub through the video and control volume and such. The controls appear on the left side of the screen, sideways, as if you were holding the phone in landscape orientation. I was blown away. It’s one of the simplest bits of polish that I’d never really appreciated on the iPhone — when you turn a video from landscape to portrait, the controls change too — that when I found it missing on the Pre, I was stunned.

It’s a beautiful device on the whole, that shows what you can do with a smaller screen and alternative input methods, but as a consumer, there are so many little paper-cut issues that hit me in just 20 minutes, I have to worry that in three hours, or three days, I’d have plum bled out.

This is why it breaks my heart to read this piece from Eric Savitz over at Barrons finding that it looks like others are in the same boat — not buying the Pre. Competition is good. Product evolution is better. But the clock is ticking, and aside from Best Buy, I have still never seen a Palm Pre in use in the wild.

Eller adds that “with the Palm’s fade,” takeover talk is also likely to evaporate. As the world realizes that the WebOS is “good but not mature enough for developers,” he adds, “Palm’s strategic value to potential acquirers diminishes.”

link: Palm: Pre Sales To Whiff Targets? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com

The Official Palm Blog: Palm webOS 1.1 enhances support for enterprise — and beyond

And for my next theory, Palm is making a very simple play for Apple to shut them up by buying the company outright. And they’re doing it the only way they know how anymore: engineering hooliganry. Audacious play, indeed.

Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).

Apple Blocks Palm Pre iTunes Syncing | PreCentral.net

No surprise that the latest iTunes breaks the Palm Pre USB hack which allowed the device to sync with iTunes. This is a promise Palm should never have made, and users who bought the Pre thinking this was a viable option to get music on their phones are the folks who suffer.

Who wins? doubleTwist is on that list. Check it out if you were counting on that iTunes sync. This may be a good alternative to managing your media.