A lot of interesting tidbits have been coming out of the Oracle vs. Google court battle, one of which is the original “Google Phone” concept. It appears Google wanted to manufacture a phone back in 2006 and approached carriers with the concept designs in hopes of convincing adoption. This BlackBerry-esque QWERTY represent a style popular among the power users of the day and while no official specs for the concept were revealed, we do have what Google considered baseline specs for any device that would run Android:

• An ARMv9 processor of at least 200MHz
• GSM (3G preferred)
• 64MB of RAM and ROM
• MiniSD
• External storage
• A 2-megapixel camera with a dedicated shutter button
• USB support
• Bluetooth 1.2
• A QVGA display with at least 16-bit color support
• Two soft menu keys

Optional:

• QWERTY keyboard
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• A “secondary display”
• Wi-Fi
• GPS
• Hardware graphics acceleration

Fast forward to today and boy how things have changed. The “Google Phone” never came to fruition, HTC ended up manufacturing the first consumer device to run Android, and today’s power users are packing quad-core processors, 1GB RAM, HD displays, 32GB of storage, 8+ MP cameras and flux capacitors.

It certainly would have been interesting if Google actually went through with their plans for the “Google Phone” and how that would have affected what Android is today (the best darn mobile OS in the world). What do you think, would you have purchased the “Google Phone” back in 2006?

• SourceThe Verge