Google Phone Rumors, Google Documents Mobile Real

Have you heard the one about HTC shipping 50,000 cell phones running Google's mobile operating system by the end of the year. Maybe, just maybe, there is something to it.

In what may be a hint of things to come, Google Documents Mobile has launched. And for what I can tell they have spent a lot of time creating and interface that is adaptable to oversized (read finger touch) controls. Finger touch controls, perfect for the iPhone or maybe the rumored GPhone. The recently released version of Google Calendar Mobile also showed similar specialization.

But before you prepare to dump your iPhone in favor of a free, ad supported GPhone, wouldn't we be talking millions of GPhones, coming from HTC not just 50,000 or so.

I tend to believe that GPhone isn't really a phone but just a suite of Web Applications for existing Mobile Phones, after all the applications appear to be generic enough to run on Window Mobile, Palm and iPhone OS's.

But when you try to generalize an application interface, you will sacrifice one thing, usability. After trying to view a spreadsheet on a one column by 20 rows at a time screen, I'm thinking Google has gone a bit to far in their generalization. You'll need a good memory to make sense of a spreadsheet with this spreadsheet interface.

And don't plan on creating blog posts on your iPhone with this version of Mobile, it is Read/Only for now. But if it had everything we wanted, there wouldn't be anything to look forward to.

All in all, Google Documents Mobile is a start, but its got a long way to go before they have a usable mobile application.

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