Nexus One Not the Only GooglePhone

The Nexus One that’s being tagged as the GooglePhone is set to be subsidized by T-Mobile down to $199 starting January 5th, 2010 but this then wouldn’t be the first Google Phone nor what I would consider it anything truly groundbreaking.

The Nexus One does have impressive specs and does come unlocked although I am sure with the T-Mobile subsidy reported by ABC News it would be confined to their network only, but to truly be a stand alone Google Phone it needs to break free of ANY mobile carrier.

Google is putting the pieces together to do just that as Google Voice allows porting & consolidating of your existing numbers online along with a VOiP network provided by the recently purchased Gizmo5 but now needs to provide near universal WiFi access which leads to its current pursuit of white spaces.

White spaces were freed up in the United States as of June 12, 2009 when those TV broadcast channels converted to a digital signal while Google sponsored a campaign named Free the Airwaves to convert those freed up white spaces to an un-licensed spectrum that can be used by Wi-Fi devices.

Interestingly Google announced this campaign a year ago but the Free The Airwaves site itself is down.

Now if this was a universally accessed VOiP only phone sold by Google independent of any of the mobile networks then that would fit my term of a GooglePhone, but if the definition is that its an unlocked phone needing a mobile provider sold via Google then thats nothing new and would make it the third such phone.

Google has been selling unlocked Android phones for approximately a year as you can purchase the Android Developer Phone 1 & 2 which is an unlocked version of the HTC Dream G1 & HTC Magic respectively.

So perhaps the Nexus One is the trial balloon to the mass consumers like the Dream was a year ago but if that’s the case then I will just wait until the Magic happens, especially if its the new phone provided again to the attendees at Google IO 2010 in May.