There are lots of reviews of the Google phone from HTC and T-Mobile flying around, including one from Walt Mossberg of the Journal that calls the G1 a “worthy competitor” for Apple’s iPhone, and one from David Pogue at the New York Times, who correctly points out that it isn’t really *the* Google phone. It’s just one of what will presumably be many Google phones, with different features, from different manufacturers. Don’t like the side-flipping keyboard or the fact that the tilt sensor doesn’t auto-rotate the display? Maybe the next Google phone will be more to your liking.

This is already a significantly different approach to the one Apple has taken, and in many ways the blogosphere’s typical (and natural) focus on the specifics of the actual G1 device itself tends to obscure the larger picture of what Google is doing. In almost every way, the Google phone approach is open, while the Apple approach is the same as it has always been: either completely closed or very strictly controlled. That kind of focus, of course, arguably makes Apple products more appealing because the hardware, software and services are tightly integrated.

That approach also restricts choice, however. Don’t like AT&T’s service? Too bad — the iPhone is only available from one carrier. The G1, by contrast, can be unlocked after 90 days and used on any GSM network. Want to use a VOIP application on your iPhone? Tough. Apple and AT&T have decided that you can’t do that, and they will remove any such app from the download store and/or remotely disable it on your device. And Apple has also decreed that you can’t run anything that competes with iTunes. Google says you can run whatever you like on your phone, and will even allow software developers to rewrite some of the phone’s functions.

From the descriptions of the G1 that I’ve seen so far (and I’m talking about the software, not the HTC hardware, which according to most reports I’ve read appears to be underwhelming at best), it sounds like it is everything that Windows Mobile could have been but isn’t: easy to use, configurable, flexible and filled with features that most Windows devices still don’t have. It will be interesting to see whether the open approach draws more users than Apple’s classic, hermetically-sealed approach.

So TMCNet blogger Rich Tehrani says he has heard rumours that Google is going to acquire Sprint. This is a subject that others have raised as well, most often in connection with the much-hyped “Google phone” — which we now know isn’t a phone at all but an open platform. In other words, it’s even less likely that Google would buy Sprint than it was before.

That’s not likely to stifle the rumour mill, however. Why? I think it’s because Google has effectively become the saviour of everything. What was once a tiny company with a simple service that everyone used and/or liked has become a globe-spanning colossus with a market value bigger than the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country — and so the implication is that Google can do anything.

What people mean when they say Google should buy Sprint is “Sprint sucks.” When they say Google should come out with a phone, they mean “the cellular phone industry sucks.” Similarly, when they say Google should buy Yahoo, or Microsoft, or China, or whatever, that’s shorthand for “those things suck. Google would fix them.”

Would Google buying Sprint make any sense? Not really. Despite the attempt to compare it to Google buying YouTube or Google buying Keyhole (which became Google Earth), it would not be anything like either of those deals. Sprint Nextel is a gigantic conglomeration of telephone poles and legacy PBXes and customer-service desks and trucks and cable. Google needs that like a hole in the head.

Open cellphones, OpenSocial — it’s obvious that Google sees as its main competitive advantage a totally open (more or less) approach to data of all kinds. Just as it is trying to create a platform for the free movement of social data through OpenSocial, so it seems determined to create an open platform in the mobile arena.

I’ll say one thing: mobile is one of the places where we could all use a bit more openness. Right now, the mobile sphere is where the Internet was back in the early 1990s — it’s a morass of proprietary standards and walled-garden content, combined with the most usurious fees since the department-store credit card was invented.

As for Apple’s iPhone, it may be sexy and fantastically useful, but it is still a bit like a mobile version of America Online as far as I can tell (just as Facebook is on the Web). Is that really the best we can do?

I don’t know whether Google is trying to control the whole mobile effort, or whether it just wants to piggyback on mobile as an ad platform, or maybe a bit of both. And there is certainly a concern, as Om Malik notes, that some of the company’s partners are less than stellar (yes, I’m looking at you, Motorola). But I think the quest for openness has to be supported in virtually every arena, if only because it makes things easier — and I would argue in the long run more rewarding — for users.

Further reading:

Search Engine Land has more on the news, and Silicon Alley Insider looks at potential winners and losers (Larry Dignan at ZDNet has some thoughts about that too). USA Today has a short Q&A with Andy Rubin, who is spearheading the Android platform project. The NYT has a story here, and the official Google press release is here.

The live-blogging press corps, meanwhile, consists of Engadget, as well as its evil twin Gizmodo, along with Silicon Alley Insider, CrunchGear’s John Biggs — who is taking questions via IM — and a blogger from PCWorld mag.

Fascinating piece in the Times on Andy Rubin, the guy behind the Gphone project — about which we are supposed to be getting some details on Monday (although actual devices running the Google mobile OS won’t be coming until next year sometime, supposedly).

Along with the requisite geek-lord toys (retinal scanner at the door, giant remote-control helicopters, robotic hand that bangs a gong instead of a doorbell, etc.), we get some history on Rubin, who joined Google after it acquired his mobile startup, Android. That was his second attempt to change the mobile device business — with the first being Danger Inc., the company that made the Sidekick smart-phone.

Although the Sidekick was hip and achieved a certain geek cred, it never really took off (Ionut Alex Chitu has more on the Sidekick at Google Operating System). Why? I wish I knew. I tried out an early model and really liked it. It was a little bulky, but the flip-out screen was pretty cool — and better still, it was a device that was designed for instant messaging and web surfing. Maybe it was just ahead of its time.

If it was ahead of its time, then so was one of Rubin’s other big projects: WebTV. Although lots of people are talking about the convergence of the television and the Internet now, putting the two together just didn’t work when WebTV tried it. Why not? I wish I knew. I came across a number of older people who liked it a lot, because they could sit on the couch and write emails or look at websites, but it never really took off.

Maybe Rubin will have better luck with the Gphone. This time (from the sounds of it) it’s just software and not hardware — although Joe Duck thinks that Rubin’s presence suggests otherwise — and it is designed to be as open as possible. And that means it is following what I believe to be a universal law, namely: Open wins.

The New York Times is reporting that the much-hyped “Google phone” isn’t going to be a dedicated device, but a mobile Linux-based operating system and suite of software that will run on phones made by others. This is more or less what many Google-watchers expected (including me — I wrote a column about the speculation for the Globe awhile back, which is here).

The idea of Google actually getting into the hardware game never made any sense to me, and still doesn’t. The idea of a compact, cross-platform mobile OS with Google software like a free (ad-supported) browser built in, however, makes a huge amount of sense to me. That would pretty much take the war to Microsoft’s doorstep, since it would compete head-on with Windows Mobile — and it’s about time that someone did, since Windows Mobile is still miles away from what it could be.

If Google’s mobile OS is free, light and fast, it could make a serious dent in the mobile market.