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.

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

From NPD this morning:

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold at their stores and Web sites with Best Buy ranked third.

via Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S. .

This is where we are starting to see the trouble of Apple’s dominance in the market. Competition is important. Competition drives innovation. Apple, of all companies needs competitors. But the dominance in the market of iTunes and the iPod/iPhone is killing it. I want the Palm Pre to succeed on the merits. I want Amazon to be a killer digital music store (it’s on the way). I believe Apple’s products and store ecosystem are best-of-breed right now. But they can be beat. What is scaring me most about the current state of the digital music market is that before long, the most creative among us may just stop trying.

I haven’t seen the Hero, and likely won’t get my hands on it for some time now. But judging by the videos in Joshua Topolsky’s review that hit today, I’m not in a hurry. And neither, as it would appear, is Flash:

So Flash is kind of a big deal on new smartphones. The iPhone doesn’t have it, the Pre doesn’t have it, BlackBerry devices don’t have it… but the Hero does. Unfortunately, in our testing, we found the inclusion actually hurts operation of the phone more than it helps. When browsing to a site heavy on Flash (there are many), the browser loading times were abysmal. Furthermore, trying to view videos in-window produced choppy, nearly unwatchable results. You may have a better experience with lighter kinds of content, but in our opinion the main reason to introduce Flash into a mobile environment is to allow for broader media viewing options, and in the current state of this Flash player, you’re not really going to get much mileage out of it.

Watch the video and see for yourself. Loading the Flash movie is an atrocious, fist-pounding experience, and while I thought Topolsky nailed the rest of the review, on this point he was far too gracious. Two things I take out of it:

1) If your customers are clamoring for a feature in a product which you know will deliver a maddening experience for them, don’t deliver the feature. There’s a reason the iPhone doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Blackberry doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Pre doesn’t have Flash. It’s because the experience is abysmal for users.

2) This is more of a damning review for Adobe than it is for HTC. It’s clearly tough to scale Flash down to mobile devices, but it’s been years now and the natives are moving passed “restless” and into resignation that they’ll never get Flash at all. Politics aside, maybe HTML5 is a better bet?

This, right here, is why the iPhone has succeeded as a platform in the ridiculously crowded handset space. From MacRumors:

Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at MobileCrunch:

- Trimming video clips on the iPhone 3GS now offers the ability to save the edited version as a copy rather than simply overwriting the original file.
- Voice Control over Bluetooth is now available, allowing users to Initiate calls and control music playback via Bluetooth headsets.
- MMS is now enabled by default, but still not supported by AT&T.
- iPhone vibrates when rearranging Home screen icons.
- A “Fraud Protection” toggle is now available in Safari settings.
- iPhone startup and shutdown and app launching times have improved.
- New APIs allow developers of third-party application to access and edit videos.
- OpenGL and Quartz have seen improvements.

Some of these simple bullets are a big deal. Non-destructive editing in the simply-fantastic video recorder? Voice control over Bluetooth? Speed improvements? This is a dot-release to a very recent major system update, and some of these features would be big enough to be part of yet another press event.

I’ve had a handset since 1994. Back then I upgraded once a year, a pace which increased over time. In 2003, I was upgrading once ever 3-5 months. I’ve been a happy iPhone user for over two years now and have no interest in changing platforms. I just don’t feel the same level of innovation in the handset market that I get from Apple.