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Still not the (An)droids you're looking for from Google

 There's no real need to doubt Bloomberg's prediction of a 23rd September launch by T-Mobile of a smartphone based on the Google Android operating system. The fact that Bloomberg seems not to have heard of Nokia or Symbian doesn't mean they don't have good sources.

The MercuryNews published the Bloomberg story yesterday, describing the T-Mobile launch as "competing with systems offered by Microsoft, Apple and Research in Motion" but essentially, adding nothing to previous statements by T-Mobile in February.

The main missing information is "who will build the phone?" since T-Mobile isn't a phone manufacturer. The same previous report suggested that HTC would be the manufacturer.

A launch date of September is more optimistic than our previous report. However, launch dates, and shipment dates, are never the same. A good guess would suggest that the phone won't ship much before December. Another guess, maybe equally good, might suggest much later.

According to Aharon Etengoff the deadline is already under stress. Version 1.0 of the software, he wrote, had to "drop support for Bluetooth and GTalk" because of time constraints. GtalkService is an instant messaging service.

Very probably, the "Android developers' bog" Etengoff referred to was this blog, and not a bog at all. That blog's "announcements" pages have nothing to say about a hardware launch, but does show excitement about a "user-driven content distribution system" called Android Market.

For the benefit of Bloomberg, the market leader world wide in smart phones, is not Apple, nor Microsoft, nor RIM. And yes, we do know that all Bloomberg top execs have a Blackberry, and that Nokia has a relatively small US market share.