Google seen beavering away on Googlephone designs

A VC has caused a major stir by claiming in his blog that Google is very actively developing its own mobile phone which he has named the Real Google Phone.

The king pin to Simeon Simeonov's speculation is that Andy Rubin is working for the firm and has assembled a team of at least 100 spods to develop the phone.

It's a good guess because Rubin was formerly president and CEO of Danger - the makers of the Hiptop. You can check him out on his own site android.com, where he conveniently doesn't say what his current job is.

To make the plot even more plausible, Simeonov also claims that Google has acquired Reqwireless . The company formerly sold a suite of mobile applications which ran on J2ME enabled phones.

Where Simeonov's guesswork seems to fall over is how Google will sell the handset. He seems to think existing carriers will roll over on their tummies and fulfil sales from the Google site.

It's far more likely that Google can set itself up as an MVNO and sell the phones itself.

There also seems to be a hint that the Real Google Phone is tilting at Apple's iPhone. If you look at what Reqwireless' software used to do (when it was still on sale), it's far more likely that Google is developing a Blackberry killer.

Doesn't Google already have its own email system? Piece of cake to design a phone that would read gmail.

Whatever turns out to be the truth, it makes for one heck of a rumour. µ

L'INQ
Simeon story