~TECH-BYTES~

Carefully orchestrated announcements for broad, sweeping initiatives like the one staged by Google today don’t always do a great job of diving straight into the meat and telling it like it is, so we thought we’d boil down the Android and Open Handset Alliance sitch as best we could into a tight, easy to digest series of bullets. If this list is still wider than your attention span, though, just know this: you can pick up your Google-powered phone in the latter half of 2008.

• At its core, Android forms the basis for Google’s operating system and supporting software for phones. In Google’s own words, it’s a software stack.
• Two separate but related entities form the basis for today’s announcement: the Linux-based Android mobile platform (a result of Google’s 2005 acquisition of a start-up of the same name) and the Open Handset Alliance, a 33-strong group of device manufacturers, component manufacturers, software companies, and carriers that have committed to working with Android.
• There is no cut and dried “Gphone” and Google doesn’t intend (or at least it hasn’t indicated an intent) to enter the hardware business. Instead, it’ll leave that to established players like HTC, LG, and Samsung — and theoretically, anyone else that wants to have a go at it since the Android platform and its code base is wide open.
• Unlike the platform itself, there’s no guarantee that devices based on the Android platform will be open to third party developers. Google says that’ll be left to manufacturers and carriers to be decide, although it doubts they’ll choose to lock them down (hmm, has Google ever worked with a carrier before?)

MORE…

8:58AM PT - Ok, we’re on the call, and there’s soothing classical. We’ll “be underway in a few minutes.”

9:02AM PT - Ok, we’re about to begin!

9:04AM PT - “Welcome everyone to the Google, Inc. conference call. Today’s call is being recorded.” Yeah, by us! Elliot Shraig (sp) from Google is on. “We have a number of companies here with an exiting announcement to make in the mobile space.”

Sergey and Eric from Goog, Peter Chou from HTC, Zander from Moto, plenty of heavyweights. Eric Schmidt is kicking off — Andy Rubin will join for the Q&A.

9:05AM PT - “Thanks everybody, for joining us. We’re obviously very, very happy that this announcement is going out today. To give you some context, there are 3 billion mobile users worldwide… getting people access to information is very important. On Google’s side we have a two part strategy… the part we want to talk about today is creating a whole new mobile experience for users, and we’re going to do that with Android.”

9:06AM PT - “Google along with 33 other companies are announcing Android, the first truly integrated mobile operating system. … What’s particularly notable is that it’s available under a mobile open source license. It’s incredibly important to say that this is NOT an announcement of the ‘Gphone’… we hope there will be thousands of ‘Gphones’…”

MORE…