After a frenzied build-up, Google, as you probably know by now, did not announce the gPhone. Instead, the company announced there might be a gPhone in your future. The announcement was heavy on future potential and light on current reality.

The basic announcement was quite simple: Google announced that the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) has been formed to create open source, Linux-based software for mobile phones and other mobile devices. With Google’s clout, this effort may fare better than previous efforts along the same line, but we will not know for a while.

Anyone caught up in the pre-announcement hype had to have been disappointed in what came out. The list of 34 current members of the OHA features some impressive names, including a few real mobile-phone carriers and handset manufacturers. As The Register pointed out,  however, this is not the first announcement of a group aiming to create software for Linux-based mobile phones (see “LiMo arrives for mobile Linux” and “ARM finds friends for mobile Linux”). We should know more next week when the alliance plans to post an “early look” at a software development kit. Even if everything works out as Google has predicted publicly, this still is not a phone, it is at best a set of software pieces that can be assembled to become the base a phone-maker can build on. It is a totally flexible platform with no restrictions on how dumb or smart the phone manufacturer wants to make the resulting phone.

Clearly the Google announcement must be viewed in comparison to the iPhone. Google got almost as much hype as Apple did, and like Apple, is a company that is not part of the traditional phone world. The iPhone and the OHA are not aiming at the simple end of the mobile phone business -- they are targeting the relatively small smart-phone segment of that business. Given its iPod track record, Apple may produce products that compete in other parts of the mobile phone biz in the future, but it’s not clear what the OHA is thinking in this area.

Time magazine tagged the iPhone the Invention of the Year. Its editors said they did so for five reasons: The iPhone is pretty; it’s touchy-feely; it will make other phones better; it’s not a phone, it’s a platform; it is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come.