The second phone on the market with Android has been announced. Instead of being on T-Mobile, this one is being put onto Vodafone in the UK, Spain, Germany and France (to SFR), with some restrictionless handsets heading to Italy.

They say you get all of two choices of colour (black or white) but I would guess that there would be a red one at some point in the future. You also get a 3.2” HVGA touch screen, trackball, various e-mail offerings, the Google apps and the Android Market (Not to be confused with the iPhone Apps Store).

Do you want it? Apparently they’re allowing people to register their interest at their local version of Vodafone/SFR/Whatever, and will be discussing prices in the future.

The full press release follows after the jump…

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Nokia (They make phones, apparently…) have paid a stupid amount of money (254m Euros, £209m, $410m or 4 Esso Tiger Tokens) for Symbian. They already owned almost half of it already, but they went ahead to get the rest of it. What will they end up doing with the newly bought entity? Why, create an Open Source platform for phones. Where have I heard of that before…

The foundation will bring together Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone in collaboration on a new, royalty-free open software platform for mobile phones.

[From BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia in full buy-out of Symbian]

Open-Source platform? For mobile phones? Supposedly groundbreaking? No matter how you look at it, this looks and smells like an attempt to beat Google’s Android, even if Kai Oistamo (Exec-VP at Nokia) says it isn’t.

OTT comment of the day:

“We’re freeing up innovation – this is epoch-making.”
Nigel Clifford (Symbian)

No it’s not. Interesting? Yes. Epoch-making? Not even close.