Google Announces Open-Source Mobile Phone OS, Android

The Google Phone has arrived, sort of, but not in the long-rumoured embodiment that many had expected. Google announced this morning that it has developed a new mobile OS called Android — a result of its acquisition of a mobile software company of the same name in 2005 — that will allow the company to get Google’s mobile apps into as many hands as possible starting in mid-2008. Android is Linux-based and open source, and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license