Google Phone Mania

There is so much hype and hysteria surrounding the Google Phone that I can't keep up with all the various rumors and speculative articles. There's so much to read and so little time. Fortunately, I have a "proxy" to filter through the noise. Rich has a deep interest in the Google Phone so he's been reading up on all the various articles and making brief summaries of what the experts say the Google Phone will and won't be. If you're too busy like me to follow the Google Phone hysteria, here's a few posts Rich made that about sums it up:
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\nVerizon Google Discuss Partnership
\nGoogle Negotiates with Sprint-Nextel
\nGoogle Phone
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\nMy own brief take on the Google Phone is that it most likely will be underwhelming. The problem with the Google Phone is that after the launch of the Apple iPhone, the bar has been set very high. I doubt the Google Phone will have multi-touch technology or any of the UI features that make the iPhone exude awesomeness. Google is a Web and software company trying to break into the already crowded mobile market. Hardware mobile manufacturers are already developing feature-rich mobile phones without Google's assistance, so having Google simply provide software won't cut it. Google needs to do what Apple did and design the hardware as well. And since Google has never been a hardware company, this is uncharted territory for them.
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\nOf course, Google has billions of dollars they can allocate to R&D to develop hardware, so I don't count them out. But sometimes all the money in the world doesn't buy brain power, intellectual property, or patent rights. If it was simply a matter of money, GE with a market cap of \$414B  (twice Google's market cap of \$216B) would have developed a mobile phone by now. Unfortunately, my prediction is that the Google Phone will exude suckiness making this the first time Google touched something that didn't turn to gold.