Today, John Gruber from Daring Fireball is asking Andy Rubin what he has to say for himself now, since he predicted that Google wouldn’t make its own Android phone.

As far as I can tell, Google isn’t making its own Android phone. It hired HTC to build it a phone that will be sold through T-Mobile. How is that any different from the G-1? The Hero? The myTouch? The Droid? Sure, Google may sell an unsubsidized version for an astronomical price as well on its own, but that’s neither novel nor likely to change sales figures by much.

Again, the Google zealots are letting themselves be spun into a frenzy over nothing. Two months ago, the Droid was god’s gift to the mobile phone universe. Today, it’s Nexus One. Tomorrow it’ll be some other phone. We’ve been here before.

A lot of people are speculating about Google’s new “mobile lab”, which is a phone that was commissioned from HTC that Google is giving to select worldwide Google employees in order to test some new Android features. At least, that’s what I gathered from Google’s actual statement on the matter.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s exactly what Microsoft did with Plays for Sure and the Zune. And we all know how that worked out.

To add more fuel to the fire, some have even speculated that the G-phone won’t be tied to any carrier, but be sold directly by Google. Sure. Because everyone wants to pay $700 for a new phone that they’re only going to be able to use on one carrier, anyway.

When are people going to realize that there is no single phone in existence that can run on both Verizon and AT&T? The choice is an illusion, people.

But this time it’s Google making a monumental blunder, not Microsoft, so everything is going to work out just fine. That is, if Google is actually dumb enough to make this blunder, which I’m not convinced it is. I think perhaps Google is just testing some new features for Android, which it will then make available to all Android phone manufacturers. They may debut these new killer features on a specific phone, but that phone will most likely be tied to a contract of some sort, and exclusive to one carrier in the U.S., at least at first.

Any way you slice it, Android isn’t going to make any inroads at beating the iPhone anytime soon. If that were the goal, Google would have a major problem on its hands. If the goal of Android is instead to simply make Google services more ubiquitous across mobile handsets everywhere by putting the final nail into the coffin of Windows Mobile, then I think Android has already succeeded.

If Google is thinking that it has already succeeded at killing Windows Mobile, and it’s wondering what to do next, I’d suggest that pissing on its business partners in a ill-advised attempt to take down Apple would be a poor choice. It’s one of those things that sounds good on paper to Apple/AT&T haters, but it would be a really dumb move for Google. For one, it wouldn’t succeed. Google simply doesn’t have the product design sense nor the hardware/software experience to go head-to-head with Apple on merit. And for another, the iPhone already does a better job than any other mobile device at pushing out Google services to the masses.More people do Google searches on iPhones than they do on all Android phones combined. They also use Google Maps, Google Reader, Google Docs, etc. Google is supposed to throw all that away because Apple didn’t approve it’s Google Voice app? I don’t buy it.

Ars Technica has basically endorsed the Wall Street Journal theory I mentioned earlier today. One of my favorite lines:

A lot of people seem quite certain that Apple’s small-time purchase of a little Internet streaming company called Lala is going to fundamentally change the entire way Apple presents content to the user.

The latest to join the fray is the Wall Street Journal, which proposes that Apple will stop selling downloaded music altogether and instead just serve up tunes that you purchase over the web. So no need to carry your entire collection on the internal storage of your iPod touch. Just hook up to the web and stream any song you’ve bought the rights to.

That sounds great. Until you drive into a parking garage. Or to the beach. Or anywhere of a million places that doesn’t have an Internet connection. Do these people ever leave their offices?

The most important feature of any iPod is the ability to get non-stop music on the go, any time, anywhere. One of the best features of the iPhone, even, is that the iPod portion plays without ever skipping a beat, no matter which other applications you jump into or what happens to your internet connection. That lack of even the slightest interruption or stutter is essential to the experience.

What would people do on an airplane, with no stored music on their iPods? Pay for Wifi on the plane, just to listen to a few songs?

Time and time again, Apple’s research has shown that most people’s entire music collection fits comfortably on an 8GB iPod, let alone the 64GB that is available. People fill their iPods and iPhones with video and apps from the App Store, not music. Giving them the option to stream a couple of gigabytes of music isn’t going to help much.

Research has also shown that most songs on people’s iPods come from other sources, either stolen downloads or ripped CDs. A streaming service would do nothing for those songs, either.

Why would Apple, then, want to ditch what has worked so perfectly for years, only to substitute it with something as flaky as wireless Internet?

And why does every little purchase have to be a game-changing experience for Apple? Maybe Lala had some good technology Apple wanted to use to “augment” the iTunes experience. Maybe enough of Lala’s engineers were super-geniuses that it was cheaper to buy the company than just lure away its people with higher salaries. Maybe they just didn’t want Google or Microsoft to buy the company first. Who knows?

How about if Apple started by allowing you to download any song you’ve purchased more than once, so that if you accidentally delete a song or lose a hard drive to a crash, you can recover your purchased files easily. Audible has allowed this for years.

How about if Apple created some sort of Pandora-type service, which leveraged the Genius algorithms it already has plus Lala’s technology to create streamable playlists of recommended songs that you can listen to with the option to purchase and download with a simple click or tap? It would only work when you had a connection, so it wouldn’t be a substitute for your main library of songs, but as an added service, that might be cool.

We still don’t know the exact details of Apple’s purchase of PA Semiconductor several years ago. Chances are, we won’t know exactly what the Lala purchase was all about for a while, either. I won’t be holding my breath for a 0GB iPod Touch, though.

More evidence that Motorola only expects to sell Droids to D&D playing nerd boys who never get laid.

The latest ad, as described in this article on AppleInsider, mocks the iPhone as a feminine beauty pageant winner, a mirror for women to fix their lipstick, rather than a serious computing tool.

Without going into the obvious ridiculousness of that statement, or the all-too-easy shortcomings of the Droid that make it far less serious than an iPhone at real-world hard-core computing tasks (Like, say, being able to load more than ten or eleven apps before running out of space, or being able to talk to someone on the phone while using the Internet simultaneously), I can easily dismiss the effectiveness of this commercial as a selling tool with a much simpler statement:

Yeah. So what’s your point?

Since when is selling a consumer device that has appeal to women a bad thing? One of the reasons Apple has succeeded where many, many other computer companies have failed with the iPod, the iPhone, and now even the Mac, is that its design is curvy, friendly, and yes, feminine enough not to turn off women, while still being cool enough to attract men who don’t spend all their time working out hexadecimal code in their mother’s basement.

This ad, like all the others before it, seems to be an admission that the Droid has an extremely limited audience. Hello? More than 50 percent of the cell-phone carrying world is female. You just told them all that 1) you’re all Prada-wearing, vapid shopaholics, obsessed with appearances, and 2) the last thing you want to do is buy a Droid. Get an iPhone instead.

Does Motorola not have 1 woman in its marketing department?

I think Motorola fails to understand that while the nerd sentiment may have taken over the universe of pop culture in the last ten years, it’s not the true nerds who run the show. Looking and talking like a nerd is cool. Being a nerd is still being a nerd. (Weezer is cool. Bill Gates still gets wedgies every day.) It’s cool to wear glasses, be super-skinny, play fantasy football instead of real football, and even carry around a personal pocket computer with you everywhere you go.

But Dungeons and Dragons is still lame, guys. And dissing women in your ad isn’t even a good way to inspire men to buy your product.

Take a lesson from beer commercials. Have your guy with the phone, surrounded by women falling all over him to get to his Droid. THAT’s how you get shallow men to buy your product.

And, for god sake, if you want to be taken seriously, stop mentioning the iPhone in your ads. You’re helping Apple, not hurting it.