Rumors have persisted over the last year and a half that Google would release its own branded cell phone; the company has repeatedly denied the gossip, emphasizing its concentration on Android as a mobile operating system that it licenses to existing cell-phone makers.

Now the NY Times reports that Google employees have received a Google-designed handset to test. An official Google blog entry, posted Saturday, calls the handset a "mobile lab" that company employees are using "to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities." The company has not commented beyond this post.

The touch-screen smartphone is made by HTC--maker of most commercially available Android handsets--to hardware and software specifications set by Google. Reports claim that the company plans to sell the new phone directly to consumers over the Internet. It apparently works on GSM networks, which would mean AT&T and T-Mobile only in the U.S. That would put Google directly in competition with Apple and its AT&T-only iPhone.

UPDATE: Pictures of the phone have surfaced on various blogs... they match previous descriptions of its looking like the upcoming HTC Passion (rumored to run Android 2.1).

Television housings, cathode ray tubes, computers, monitors, and other imported electronic waste items not salable at the Alaba Market in Lagos, Nigeria, are dumped in this nearby swamp. Credit: Basel Action Network

A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators. Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders. A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:

For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.

However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:

Bart Gordon, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, said that "we need our future engineers to understand that whatever they put together will eventually have to be taken apart."

On Monday Nokia launched a new research center based on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The company already operates research centers in ten other locations around the world.

During a press briefing, chief development officer Mary McDowell said that, given the current economic climate, the new center will not pursue big-sky research but will focus on technologies that can be brought to market in three-to-five years. Areas of particular focus will include user interfaces, cognitive radio (a way to enable wireless devices to more efficiently share airwaves), technologies targeted at emerging markets, and what the company calls "context modeling" (applications that rely on information from sensors and GPS).

At Monday's launch event, the company offered demos of some research projects already under development at its Palo Alto, CA outpost, including a phone playing a 3D movie. As Duncan Graham-Rowe reports today on our site, 3D displays are going mobile. In the Nokia prototype, the effect is created by projecting a different image to each eye and it requires specially-created content. Phones that contain two cameras could allow users to create their own 3D content, said Henry Tirri, worldwide head of Nokia Research Center.

Watching movies seems to be the only marketable application for non-holographic 3D displays so far. Last week at the Frontiers in Optics conference in San Jose, I attended a session where researchers lamented the inability of such displays to crack into the market. At that session, Gregg Favalora, the founder of now-folded Actuality Systems, said that his company should have focused on more gee-whiz, easier-to-market applications like displays for corporate lobbies. (Instead, they did the engineering first, coming up with some pretty amazing but expensive devices for projecting volumetric images of medical scans used to plan cancer radiation treatments.) Watching a 3D movie on your cell phone, or snapping 3D images on the fly, might offer just this gee-whiz factor.

Nokia researchers also showed a project based in Bangalore. The company supplies 65% of the mobile services in India, and most of these phones are limited to calls and text messages--they don't offer GPS or Internet access. Deepti Chafekar, a researcher based at the Palo Alto Research Center, said the company is testing a set of location-aware services that are based on text messaging. For example, a user can send a text asking how to get somewhere, and receive directions in the form of a text message. User location is determined by proximity to cell towers. Another service being tested in Bangalore lets users display their location to someone they're texting with.