Everything We Know About Google’s Open Handset Alliance

The details on Google’s gPhone Open Handset Alliance are coming to light. Here’s what we know:

•They’re hoping to make a better phone, ultimately. (And sell a ton of ads and services, of course, along the way.)

•Android, an open system for handset dev, is the first joint project and core product of the alliance.

•There are 34 members of the group, including NVIDIA, Intel, Texas Instruments, Synaptics (haptics!), Marvell, Qualcomm (chips), Motorola, Samsung, TMO, Sprint, LG, HTC, KDDI and DOCOMO from Japan and China Mobile Comm. Corp.. Basically, a lot of companies sick of Windows Mobile Slop and other closed up phone systems like the iPhone.

•Who’s missing is interesting: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry/RIM, Apple, Verizon, and AT&T. Oh, did I forget to mention Microsoft?

•Handsets coming in 2008, second half.

•Nov 12th, the Android early look SDK drops.

•Android built on Linux, made avail as open source via the Apache v2 License.

•Companies can dev custom functionality to Android without contributing the source code back to the community.

• HTC’s first prototype is the dream. It’s the first set of hardware details we’ve heard of.

•Chen’s rounded up Gphone details from a couple of mainstream publications. There’s nothing you haven’t read above, but a few more quotes.

I’ll update this post as more comes. Just got off a conference call, actually. No new details. This is the basic outline of what we have for now, but there are more details here: