It’s been a while, but now Google can loudly proclaim “Me Too!” when it comes to the Android Phone Party. One of the main bodies behind the Android movement, it’s been strange that Google hasn’t created it’s own phone, instead leaving it to others such as HTC to do all the hard work, but now Google has unleashed the Nexus One.

The Nexus One (still marked as HTC, but more under Google direction than anything) has a 3.7″ screen running at 480x800, 5 megapixel camera, noise suppression, trackball and personalized laser engraving (I suggest “It’s not an iPhone, honest!”)
It’ll also run pretty much anything from the Android Market, do voice recognition, allow you to read your voicemail and many other random tasks most normal people won’t actually do. Power users will have a field day with this.

Google are selling the phone for $529 unlocked through their own store, which is an interesting move, considering most people will first hear of the cost of phones in conjunction with a contract, which the order page already suggests at $179 and locked in for 2 years.

I do have to wonder if people will flock to this, or if the iPhone has nothing to worry about…

Press Release and Gallery after the jump.

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Despite there being a whole month left in 2009, Google has decided to release a list of the top searched words, phrases and randomness in the UK from this and previous years…

Year by Year in the “Noughties” (except for 2000, because that doesn’t count for Google for some weird reason):
2001: notradamus
2002: spiderman
2003: prince charles
2004: big brother
2005: james blunt
2006: steve irwin
2007: iphone
2008: iplayer
2009: stephen gately

Nostradamus to Stephen Gately in 9 years. I doubt he saw that coming…

You can find out about other search patterns at google.com/insights/search, and other search lists from Google UK’s press department are available after the jump.
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The Mountain View Chocolate Factory called Google has added to Labs “Social Search”.

Effectively, the search giant has made a way to allow my friends to influence my search results. Blog posts and other related content by my social circle get put into the results, which as an idea isn’t too shabby. Just in case I don’t read my friend’s blogs at all. Last time I checked, I wasn’t that unsociable…

Feel free to add it through the Google Labs.

[via the Official Google Blog]

Today Google has expanded its popular Street View on Google Maps service to include imagery from eleven cities across Canada, including Vancouver and Whistler. With the 2010 Winter Games coming in February, Street View on Google Maps will enable people within Canada and worldwide to explore the host city and Olympic venues, from B.C. Place Stadium to Whistler Village, and other regions and landmarks across Canada.

Using Street View on Google Maps, a free feature, people can virtually explore and navigate neighbourhoods through panoramic street-level images. The tool first launched in May 2007 and is hugely popular worldwide; in 2009 alone, Canadians have viewed more than 150 million Street View images of other countries. Imagery is now available for 13 countries in addition to Canada: Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the U.S. It is also available on Google Maps for Mobile.

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Question: How do you make Internet Explorer work better? Answer: According to Google, install a plugin called Google Chrome Frame that lets IE work like Chrome.

Here, let this fine looking gentleman explain it for you…

Just to clarify what Alex Russell is saying, you can install a plugin for Internet Explorer that, when a webpage has a specific tag included, runs the site through a frame within IE that runs a version of Chrome. This is apparently to allow “faster, more powerful” apps (Google’s buzzwords) to run, and at the moment it’s meant to be used by developers as opposed to the public in general.

So… place your bets: How long until the functionality gets built out of it by the IE Team…

[via Google's Chromium Blog]

Google have finally seen sense, by allowing Google Sync (the thing you can use on your vaguely intelligent phones, such as the iPhone, Windows Mobile and S60 stuff) to not only sync the Gmail contacts and Google Calendar appointments to your phone, but now allows for full Gmail support. Hurrah!

Of course, this is useful if your existing phone provider doesn’t do any sort of push e-mail from anything other than their own service. Your main location for all of this is… http://m.google.com/sync

Thank you Google. Thank you.

[via the Official Google Mobile Blog]

Google continues to amaze me with what it creates. Recently, thanks to the mild annoyance of the Japanese of Street View, Google have decided to combat the anger there with a stop motion animation…

For those bereft of the ability to view that, it’s a video of a robot with a camera for it’s head driving around a toy town, taking photos of everything. It then goes home, scans the image for problems, such as licence plates, and is kept until the early morning working on other complaints that people have e-mailed or called in with.

Yes, it’s Google on a charm offensive to the Japanese. Does it work? To me, yes. Then again, I’m not from Japan.
It does make me wonder why there’s so little of that sort of thing done by Google in the rest of the world…