I'll leave the specs to the tech blogs, here's some links:

Engadget

Mashable

Gizmodo

Got all that? Good. So what does this all mean? Google's sudden announcement of sorts (of course, this is still all very unofficial) could signal an important shift in the way Google is marketing Android. Clearly, the real competition for Android is the Apple iPhone OS. Apple has always been a hardware manufacturer who also makes their own software and OS, however Google has always kept a hard line of being the exist opposite, focusing on data as a product. If Android is to succeed, part of that success will be to distance itself from the third party only precedent that Windows Mobile has already set, and adding a first party device could help to do just that. Even Microsoft has realized the value of a first party device with the often rumored pink phone.

Android is still a third party first platform, and although this may create some buzz for Android in Q1, this is still a third party phone from HTC with a Google logo on it. That does make it a gold standard Android device (with no third party skins and theoretically first priority ROM updates), but so is the Droid, so what is the justification for Google? If the no contract purchase rumor holds true, is this just Google making an attempt to try and shift the market away from subsidized devices? We'll have to wait and see, but since we've already effectively seen the ROM that will be in the device in the Droid (2.1), that really only leaves room for hardware surprises to capture market share. We'll likely see what cards Google has to play at CES in January.

The real time feed could cause far reaching benefits for all of Google's services over the next few months as the big G continues their roll out. It's a safe bet that as this technology matures in the coming months we'll see further improvements that are thanks to the accessibility of real time data.

[dtse][/dtse]

Google real-time search results

Announced on Monday (see Mashable's post on the topic), Google's real-time search functionality appears to now be fully live. Try some timely topical searches (Tiger is a safe bet these days) and you should see comments, posts, and articles streaming in as they are created. As this technology matures this has the potential to blur or completely erase the line that exists between live feed based informational searches and traditional crawl based searches, and the reach of microblogs suddenly becomes that much more vast as well. Google's video demo after the break.