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OK, before I get into the specs, leaks, etc let me explain the title. Right out the gate the major things to know are:

• They’ll be sold unlocked – no contract required
• Developed by HTC and sold directly from Google
• GSM with possibility of UMTS (3G) on AT&T and T-Mobile (what I read here is “SIM CARDS”)
• CDMA is likely in the future (why would they NOT want Verizon and to a lesser extent Sprint)
• Android 2.1
• They just purchased Gizmo5 – next in line to Skype as a VOIP service

The phone itself will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 GHz ARM CPU, it will use an OLED display, and have a capacitive touch screen with on-screen keyboard (*sigh*… I hate touch screen kb’s… I need a physical keyboard).

Daring Firball says they’ve found the strings of a Google phone visitor in their weblogs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD56C) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

So back to how they’ll gut the cellular industry… If you add up all the different pieces what you’re looking at is a phone that:

• Requires no contract
• Is VOIP enabled
• Has Google Voice built in

If you REALLY wanted too… you could skip the carriers all together and simply use the phone on open Wifi or even Mifi. At that point the carriers are meaningless. Voice communications via cellular doesn’t fit into Google’s business plan at all. ANYTHING over the Internet, be it voice call via VOIP, text messsages via Google Voice, location based look-up with Google search on your phone, etc go directly to Google’s bottom line… search and advertisements. As far as Google is concerned if the carriers become nothing but data providers… so be it.

Look for this to be released in January (sad they missed the  holiday season). Google KNOWS that mobile is the next major wave of computing. They’ve been angling in this direction for quite some time and the release of an unlocked Google designed phone makes it crystal clear that they intend to dominate mobile in the way they’ve dominated search. It’s not a lock… they have to battle the entrenched iPhone and of course Microsoft is coming out with Windows Mobile 7 (though admittedly they’re moving so slowly that they may miss the bus). The point here is that unlike Apple and Microsoft and RIM, Google is making a move here that in the long run could completely sidestep the major carriers… or at least cause them to be nothing but data providers. We are of course a few years out from anything like this happening en mass… but if you look at what Google is doing that’s definitely a very real possibility.

Ok so it’s a bit funny because it comes from Pocketpcitalia so of course it comes with an Italian accent. The video starts with a Metallica song and then this Italian dude showing off the device, it makes it quirky. Oh, several times you can see the reflection of the presenter camera on the glare of the device screen. LOL! Enuf talk… here’s the video of the HTC Touch Pro 2 including TouchFlo3D 2.

I’ve been using GMail for a while now; it’s really an incredible email platform and when they rolled out Google Calendar it seemed they were going in for the kill. However, I never really found an easy/free way to sync my contacts or calendar with other devices. Of course you can export your contacts and import them to Outlook (which I rarely use nowadays for personal use) and with IMAP support you can sync your calendars into Outlook as well. However, I also have an HTC Touch… the ability to sync to that device was missing.

Recently, I stumbled on NuevaSync–a free service that sync’d both my Gmail contacts and my Google Calendar.  Thankfully, they also support Google Apps accounts.

Supported devices:

• Apple iPhone® 2.0, iPhone® 3G and iPod® touch 2.0
• Windows Mobile® based PDAs and smartphones

Supported Services:

• Google Calendar for calendar events.
• Google Contacts / GMail for contacts.
• Plaxo for contacts.

According to their site: “NuevaSync allows direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar. NuevaSync does not need any software installed on your device because it uses synchronization protocols that are already built in.”

Pretty slick… and it’s a free service.

After finding the NeuvaSync site I started Googling to find others who had and found an article on TechCrunch that includes a Q&A with the development team. It’s an interesting read and you should check it out.

Check out NeuvaSync here.

On a related note there is another contact management (though no hints as to calendar sync) application called Soocial which may be worth checking out.

Supposedly the images below represent the 2009 line-up of HTC devices coming out. Of note are the Sprint HD Pro ( Tungsten W), VZW HD Pro (Rhodium W) & the Sprint Jasper. The posters of at PPCGeeks suspect that the Jasper will be the first HTC Android phone for the Sprint network… looks like I might be waiting on getting a new phone after all!  (view all the phones by clicking the Read More link).

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If you looked at the HTC Diamond and thought “Nah, I need a keyboard”, heads up: this might be the phone for you. Featuring much of the same look and feel of the HTC Diamond, the HTC Touch Pro boasts HSDPA and HSUPA connectivity (up to 7.2 mbps – glorious!), the same 2.8 inch VGA screen as the Diamond, a 1350 mAh battery, 512 MB of flash ROM storage, 288 MB of RAM (what a curious number – why not 256 MB?), microSD expansion, GPS capabilities (no real GPS, only AGPS? Really?), built-in TV-out functionality, and a 3.2 megapixel camera. The full press release is below, followed by a bunch of images of this beautiful device.

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