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Reuters has reported that T-Mobile and Google will make an announcement on September 23rd.  And rumor has it that this will be the long awaited “Dream” or GPhone that has been talked about for quite a while now.  The phone will be made by HTC and operate on T-Mobile’s relatively new 3G network.

The arch of this story is interesting.  In November 2007 the blogoshere was aflame with interest in Google’s plans. Mashable, Techcrunch and scores of others confirmed that Google would be launching its own Mobile Phone OS that would be the “first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” This was met with great excitement in the industry, especially following on the heels of all the excitement over Google’s plan for OpenSocial.  It seemed that “open” was going to be the wave of the future.  But as Ian Hendry of WeCanDo.Biz points out, OpenSocial hasn’t exactly materialized and has far from revolutionized the world of Social Netowrking.

So what is the promise of Android?  Here is a look at some of it’s functionality from back in May at the Google developer’s conference:

So will all this amount to a better user experience than the much trumpeted Apple OS X?  That remains to be seen. Dan Frommer at AlleyInsider sounded less than excited over Android a few weeks back. But that is not to count Android out yet.  Perhaps it will be less elegant than Apple’s OS X, but, as AllyInsider points out in an earlier article:

“If Apple is successful this year, it will sell 10 million phones — in a market of 1 billion. That’s 990 million phones that aren’t Apple. We think Google’s best going after the 990 million — and continuing to enjoy the massive flood of Google search traffic that comes from the iPhone…”

Indeed, Google could be recreating the old Windows verses Mac showdown of the 80’s on mobile.  It will be fascinating to see, again, which model reigns supreme.

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