@noes point taken, lots of rumors out there. Like I said, I find the idea of data only interesting, but didn't spend enough time with the phone to be able to say whether what my friend (an engineer there, but not on the android team) claimed is true, or whether he was confused because of a limited data only trial that google may have gone with so employees could use at least voip and internet before they got their own voice/data plan for the device.

@noes My friend works at Google. He had the phone with him today and showed it to me. He told me it was data only. He may have been mistaken, but this isn't friend of a friend heard somewhere type of info. I work with mobile data devices and found it an interesting prospect.

@noes I don't care if anyone believes me. I know enough about the mobile device space to no feel intimidated by a random person on Engadget who says they don't believe me. Read more carefully next time and you'll see that I said I didn't confirm that the device was absolutely set up for data only and that someone else may be able to confirm by looking deeper at hardware settings. It's possible that Google gave employees a limited period SIM on a data plan only so they could only use data for a month or sountil they replaced with their own sim and the person I talked to was mistaken about the hardware config. Either way, I found the possibility of a data only device intriguing and thought others would as well.

Friend from Google showed it today. Pretty slick. Piece of info I found interesting is that he indicated that the phone was data only, sort of in the vein of the Kindle, and uses the data network of a phone operator to do VOIP only calls (presumably using Google Voice). Google might be creating a new class of phones that are slightly different than the voice/data phones we're all used to (after all, voice is just data, why have the extra radio). I wonder if dropping that functionality (or not turning it on in the chipset) is going to result in big power savings for the device (OLED screen can't hurt either). Anyway, hadn't seen this particular point anywhere. Wasn't able to verify that voice circuitry was missing or disabled, but perhaps someone else has confirming sceenshots of hardware config...

This is the type of thing when people are in a hurry to market and don't think about contracts. Happens even to people who should know better

Anyone else see issues with the boot sequence, in particular with the code signing? It doesn't look like there's going to be much freedom to do what you want with their "open source" OS. I question whether it would really be compliant with the GPL v3 or free software principles if you're not really free to modify it without causing your boot sequence to fail and result in an "official" version being downloaded from your new Google overlords.

Sounds about right. If Apple announces in January and ships in 2nd half of the year it gets two benefits: 1) makes customers delay purchases of other devices in anticipation of the Apple device, 2) allows the Apple fans to save their pennies so that when it does launch they'll have enough in their bank accounts.

Go back to IP school son. Failure to bring an infringement action doesn't invalidate the patent. Apple could drop the patent hammer 5 years from now on all of the past sales of every device that infringes on their patents and even if its the first time that hammer comes out of the toolbelt, it's going to be shiny and new and put a nice indentation in the side of someone's head. You won't even need Dexter to tell you what type of hammer was used...

two reasons that Apple won't go after MSFT and its customers:

Microsoft has it's own multi-touch patents and I bet if you looked into it many of them pre-date the Apple patents. Microsoft and Apple likely have a cross license because of their history with the investment and Office on the Mac.

Palm, they're safe because they have patents on smartphones that Apple is probably infringing and in a patent battle between the two, even if Apple won a 5% royalty on Palm sales and Palm got a 1% royalty on Apple sales, Palm wins.

Google has search patents, lots of them, but they are new to the consumer electronics game and have next to nothing in the CE space. They may feel comfortable with putting multi-touch APIs in their software, but they're not about to implement it in their applications.

Moto: I'm surprised that they didn't feel comfortable enough with their patent portfollio to stick it in Apples eye and add multi-touch support throughout the non-Google apps and UI. I'm guessing that there are plenty of Moto patents that Apple is infringing with the iPhone.

If they are marketing the device, then portions of their FCC filing should become public, so maybe there'll be some nice internal/external photos up on the FCC website tomorrow.