GPhone, iPhone, it sounds like we are going to end up with an alphabet soup of mobile phones and mobile operating systems. For the past year there has been rumors about Google actually producing a mobile device but those rumors were eventually dismissed by the majority of industry experts. Over the past couple weeks my interest in mobile devices and their relation to social applications has surged.

As I wrote this morning, I believe that the new iPhone will transform the social web. The opening of mobile platforms will help developers build applications which work with an inherently social device: the phone. Throw in the power of GPS tracking features and you are on your way to a mobile revolution.

According to Gary Krakow, there will be a physical GPhone released in 2009. That conflicts with the most recent rumors that the actual GPhone is dead. Most recently it appeared that Google was working with manufacturers to get their operating system as the default operating system. According to Ed Burnette, that operating system will be 100 percent open-source.

Given that the iPhone will be the first to market, Google faces some tough challenges as they will most likely trail behind Apple by at least 6-months. That may not matter though as a small army of Android developers have already begun working on applications, a few of whom have won contests held by Google to create top notch applications.

2008 is turning out to be a year of openness for software manufacturers both in the mobile sphere as well as social. While it is still unknown when Google will announce a phone with Android installed, it is clear that the iPhone will be their primary competitor. Do you think that Google is working on their own mobile device?