Google phone: It's baaack....

Rumors of the birth of a Google phone have been greatly exaggerated ... to date. But the rumor mill is grinding away again.

Business Week goes into details about the advertising possibilities, noting that it could be a free service, a nightmare for current cell carriers. That's the killer app to me. If so, bye bye iPod, and many cell carriers.

HT Lounge says it will run Linux and will be manufactured by HTC, may be 3G enabled with chips by Qualcomm.

A ZDNet blog has a picture, which appears to be made by Samsung. The pic first showed up on Mobileburn, but no one knows yet if it's real. The image on mobileburn was removed due to high-bandwidth usage.

I hope it shows up soon. I want to check it out, ads and all.

Update: Forbes has a nice article about HTC, the Taiwanese company rumored to be making the handset for the Google phone. I has built smart phones and handheld devices for such companies as AT&T, Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, running Windows and Palm software. But the article concludes that HTC could just be one of several manufacturers.