Don’t know if you’ve heard of the “gPhone” rumor, in which Google has been secretively tinkering in the background getting ready to launch a phone which would compete with the massively famous iPhone. Well, I think they recently took it in a different direction at the last minute. Instead they have launched a brand-spanking new mobile phone application, named Android.

I guess they thought, hey instead of having to think and come up with a large library of features to try and compete (which might have set them back several months or a couple of years), why not get the masses to work for us and in return we’ll give the best developer $10 million. This would leverage the great talent out there, and maybe, Google might just come out with a phone specifically for this application to run on. (Video posted after the jump.)

“The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and run on Dalvik, a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use which runs on top of a Linux kernel.”

From what’s stated above, Android is simply an application a methodology and inspiration of open source which serves as a basic core for a mobile device, allowing developers to create their own features for it. We can definitely expect to see some really nice features come out of this project, so make sure to keep an eye on this new Google odyssey.