If I may be indulged with a moment to brag: I would like to hereby take full and total credit for breaking the Google Phone story back in 2007. Today, Google unveiled its real phone: the Nexus One. As I reported back in October of 2007, this is a real Google-branded phone, made by Google and distributed by the phone carriers. Of course, I got some things wrong in that initial story. I don't now expect that Google will be getting into the wireless carrier game. Also, the Nexus One is notably not based on the X86 architecture, but that's OK. I expect my source from this original story simply got this device confused with specifications for the Google Netbook. 

Thanks for indulging me. You should all feel very cool and hip for reading our humble blog and newspaper. After all, we saw this one coming.

What do all these new phones mean for developers? Well, they mean that mobile application development just got a lot easier. Essentially, there are now only three platforms: Apple, Research In Motion and Android. All those other also-rans are going to slowly vanish from view, or concentrate on non-smart phones. The second wonderful thing about these three platforms is that they all have browsers. Why bother building a native app from three forks of the same code, when you can have a Web app with no code branches?

Finally, with a Google-made phone, we also get Google-made development tools. And I think we can all agree that Google understands developers, perhaps even a little more than RIM and Apple do. 

While Apple is a developer-friendly entity, it's AppStore policies are a source of frequent complaint. Those complaints aren't from users, but from developers who want to distribute their applications therein.

RIM understands its developers, but they are also something of a walled-garden, and that whole single-point-of-failure thing is a big headache sometimes.

So we are left with Google and Nokia. Nokia's ideas are present in the new n900, but it's still a big bag of mobile thingies that aren't quite integrated yet.

That leaves Google. Of GWT, Closure, AppEngine fame.