Google Phone

Evidence for the existence of the Google phone keeps piling up. It's pretty much confirmed though not officially official, between a fairly solid Boston Globe piece and Om Malik's five facts "from a reliable source." The down and dirty:

It's Linux-based, runs Java apps (the entire UI is in Java, as well as possibly the browser), plays multimedia files, and the OS is running on "3-to-5 devices, most of them likely made by HTC." Slightly disappointing is that the UI is "typical of mobiles phones," meaning it's not groundbreaking. But, the browser might be based on the same engine that's in Safari the iPhone (WebKit), and Google's supposedly been tweaking it to make it speedier