Google Exec Quashes Mobile Phone Rumors

In rather emphatic and unmistakable terms, a managing director for Google's Southeast Asia operations flatly denied his company is building a cell phone of its own, in a statement for The Australian Financial Review, despite reports from major press services over the past 48 hours that the company had actually confirmed those rumors.

BetaNews had been seeking confirmation of the "confirmation," but had received none from either Google itself or from reputable analysts with whom we've communicated in the past. On Tuesday, Nomura mobile phone industry analyst Richard Windsor said he was told at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, writing in an official note circulated through press sources, "Google has come out of the closet at the CeBIT trade fair admitting that it is working on a mobile phone of its own."

Google's Richard Kimber told the Australian press that his company is not making a "GPhone" - a rumor which Google has had to quash before - and then quoted his company's celebrated chief evangelist, Vinton Cerf, in emphasizing that Google is a software company, not a hardware company. Google doesn't need to produce hardware to get Google's brand on it, he emphasized.

Naturally, analysts today have extrapolated new meanings from Kimber's statement, going so far as to speculate that a recently discovered patent application filed last July and published last month, for multiplexing search results to mobile devices through simultaneous connections, is an indicator that Google may be planning to partner with Apple in developing unique new services for its iPhone. Making this speculation is noted Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

This afternoon's Reuters story, citing Jaffray, reads, "Speculation about Google products has been wrong before." It does not go on to cite a Reuters story run just hours earlier which spread the "GPhone" confirmation news, which has since apparently been withdrawn.