One of the perils of writing about technology for a monthly print magazine is that by the time your story hits the newsstands, it’s often been overtaken by events.

Such is the fate of Daniel Roth’s long piece on Google’s Android project in the July issue of Wired.

Entitled “Google’s Open Source Android Phone Will Free the Wireless Web” and available here, it’s a well-reported behind-the-scenes look at Google’s (GOOG) effort to do for the mobile Web what Microsoft (MSFT) did for the desktop: provide the platform on which everybody else must dance.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone plays the same bit part in Roth’s story that the original Macintosh played in Microsoft Windows’: a inspiring example to show what’s possible — and perhaps be mined for stealable ideas — while the standard-setting steamroller grabs that 90% market share. Here’s the key paragraph:

“Those hoping for a new gadget to rival the iPhone finally understood that Google had something radically different in mind. Apple’s device was an end in itself — a self-contained, jewel-like masterpiece locked in a sleek protective shell. Android was a means, a seed intended to grow an entire new wireless family tree.” (link)

Google’s plan may yet work. But for Wired, the timing of Roth’s piece could hardly be worse. Not only did it arrive in the middle Apple’s carefully orchestrated drumroll for the July 11 iPhone 3G launch, but it landed just as the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Google’s plans have hit two serious roadblocks.

The first roadblock is the carriers. As Roth reports, Google was already having trouble getting the mobile phone operators to play along. The country’s two biggest — Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T), with a combined market share of 54% — passed. “There wasn’t anything viable we were willing to entertain,” Verizon Wireless spokesperson Jeffrey Nelson told Roth. So Google went with the third and fourth best, T-Mobile (DT) and Sprint Nextel (S). Now the Journal reports that T-Mobile won’t have any Android phones ready before the fourth quarter and has been sucking up so much of Google’s time with its demands that Sprint won’t have anything this year at all. Ominously, China Mobile, the sleeping giant Google was counting on in the Far East, but which has also been in talks with Apple, has also pushed back its Android launch.

Even more critical, if Google hopes to build a vibrant software platform, are the snarls developers are running into. As the Journal reports:

“The Android software has yet to win broad support from large mobile-software developers. Some say it is difficult to develop programs while Google is making changes as it finishes its own software…..

“Some developers say it is easier to work with Apple’s programming tools than Google’s because of the familiarity with the company’s Macintosh operating system. …

“Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google, says managing the software-development effort while giving its partners the opportunity to lobby for new features takes time. ‘This is where the pain happens,’ he says.” (link)

Apple, by contrast, has a waiting list of carriers around the world willing to sell the iPhone and thousands of programmers eager to write for the device; at its developers conference two weeks ago, Apple had to turn them away once the first 5,200 spots were filled.

“I’m rooting for Android, big-time,” writes one high-profile developer, John Gruber, in his widely-read Daring Fireball blog. “It’s easy to imagine how Android, as an overall platform, could wind up being better than the iPhone.”

But that’s a big if, he adds, before the paragraphs that cut to the crux of the issue:

“The big advantage Apple has with the iPhone is that they control the entire product, top to bottom. The case, the chipsets, the OS, the user interface. Apple knows exactly what the screen will look like when a brand new iPhone is turned on for the first time. Google’s dependence on hardware and carrier partners puts the final product out of their control — and into the control of companies whose histories have shown them to be incompetent at design and hostile to users.

“I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but my hunch is that the only way we’ll see an iPhone-caliber Android phone is if Google does what they’ve said they’re not going to do, which is to design and ship their own reference model “gPhone”. That doesn’t mean Android won’t still be successful in some sense if it remains on its current course, but that I don’t expect it to be successful in the “holy shit is this awesome!” sense that the iPhone is.” (link)

- - -

Nobody expects anything quite so awesome out of it, but the other big news in mobile phone operating systems Tuesday was Nokia’s decision to purchase the 52% of Symbian it didn’t already own, combine the different OS versions into one platform, and make it open and free. Symbian dominates the global cellphone market with 60% of installed base, according to the Nokia press release. Here’s Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer take on the acquisition:

“Buying Symbian won’t help Nokia build sexier-looking, high-end gadgets. But in theory, Nokia’s ownership will speed up Symbian’s platform development and could allow Nokia — its biggest customer — to come out with more phones, faster. That’s important as new competitors enter the market with sexier, more exciting products…” (link)

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that opens Monday morning in San Francisco would be a relatively obscure technical gathering of programmers and IT administrators - with sessions on “Advances in OpenGL” and “What’s New in Objective-C” - were it not for one thing.

Steve Jobs.

The keynote address that Apple’s CEO is scheduled to give starting at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm ET) is perhaps the second most closely watched event in high tech - after the opening speech Jobs gives every January at Macworld.

In the audience at Moscone West’s main hall will be - in addition to thousands of developers (WWDC sold out for the first time this year) - hundreds of reporters, photographers, TV crews, venture capitalists, CEOs and maybe even a few celebrities from Hollywood and the music world.

What’s Jobs going to talk about? To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we think we know he’s going to say, and things we know we don’t know. Here’s a rundown:

3G iPhone. Except for a few short sellers on Wall Street, everybody who follows Apple assumes that Jobs will introduce a new iPhone that can send and receive data at so-called third-generation speeds. (In fact, so widespread is this belief that if Jobs doesn’t show up with the thing on Monday, Apple’s (AAPL) shares will get hammered before he leaves the stage.) Almost everything else about iPhone 2.0 are matters of little hard information and intense speculation. Is it thicker or thinner than version 1.0? Will it have a built-in GPS chip so it always knows where it’s at? Will its price be subsidized by AT&T and the overseas carriers? Will it go on sale next week or sometime later? If these questions weren’t still in play, there would be almost nothing to talk about next week.

The SDK. We know Jobs is going to spend some time discussing the so-called software development kit for the iPhone. We know because that’s one of the two main themes of the conference (symbolized by the bizarre image of two Golden Gate Bridges that decorated the e-mail invitation). The other theme is the Macintosh operating system; presumably the two are merging somewhere in Marin County, judging by the doctored photograph. The SDK will finally give third party developers access to the platform Apple has managed to build, as Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg notes, without them. There’s a flood of new software for the iPhone and iPod touch ready for release soon as Apple gives the word - including programs that will allow IT departments, should they be so inclined, to integrate the iPhone into their enterprises the way Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry is today.

.Mac. Even Jobs agrees that Apple’s $99-a-year suite of Internet services (Mail, Backup, iSync, iDisk, etc.) needs an overhaul, if only to match the online applications that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free. By tracking crumbs of information scattered in recent Apple software releases, some observers believe Jobs is set to replace .Mac with something called Mobile Me, or just plain .Me. Probably the single most effective thing Apple could do improve .Mac would be to emulate Google and give it away.

Another iPhone. Speculation that Jobs would introduce a so-called iPhone nano - a smaller iPhone at a more affordable price - has faded; the smart money has pushed this back to next January. However, as American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu points out, there are good reasons to suspect that Apple will keep the first generation iPhone around, if only to have something to sell in those parts of Latin America - and parts of North America, for that matter - where where 3G coverage is spotty or nonexistent.

New MacBooks. Two weeks ago, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster put the odds of Apple introducing redesigned Mac portables next week at 60%. The other odds he gave - 80% by the end of summer - now seem more like it.

New Touchscreen device. Wu in report to clients this week said he’s learned that work on larger, 4-inch and 7-inch multitouch devices has “gone beyond the prototype stage” at Apple. He goes out on a limb and gives 50-50 odds that one will be introduced at WWDC next week.

Those are the key themes, but there’s plenty more to speculate about. If you want to dig deeper - in a suitably interactive way - come to WWDC with a copy of the 2008 edition of John Siracusa’s Keynote Bingo card, pasted below the fold. The rules are laid out in detail at Ars Technica here, but they’re pretty straightforward: put a token over a square if Jobs mentions the topic or says the word or introduces the speaker during the keynote. Cover five squares in an a row, and you get to stand up and shout Bingo!

Nobody’s won the game yet. This could be the year.

[Moscone West photo courtesy of MacNN.]

“It’s the software, stupid.”

That’s the take-home message of a research note sent to clients Wednesday by Needham & Co.’s Charlie Wolf, who initiated coverage of Research in Motion (RIMM) with an unenthusiastic “hold.”

While Wolf sees little risk to RIM’s grip on power users in corporations, he warns that the company’s recent growth spurt, driven largely by a successful run at the consumer market, may soon run into a roadblock.

“RIM quickly captured the pole position in the consumer market with the sleek Pearl,” he writes. By contrast, RIM’s major competitors, Motorola (MOT), Samsung, HTC and Palm (PALM), all stumbled, according to Wolf, “because they attempted to invade the consumer market using the Windows Mobile operating system, at best a difficult-to-use platform.”

All that could change, he says, when Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone software developers kit (with enterprise support) comes out of beta in June and Google’s (GOOG) Android system arrives later in the year.

“In contrast with BlackBerry’s comparatively primitive development platform, applications on the iPhone will be able to exploit the much more powerful Mac OS 10 operating system as well as the next-generation multimedia capabilities built into the phone that no competitor has come close to matching.”

Android could also pose a threat to RIM, but Wolf is less sanguine about Google’s software. “It’s way too early,” he says, “to declare the Android platform a success.”

Wolf’s 2009 forecast has RIM earning $4.05 per share on revenue of $10.2 billion, compared with earnings of $2.26 on revenues of $6.0 billion in 2008. In other circumstances that might sound like a solid “buy.” But RIM’s shares have been trading over $120 lately, which implies growth at a rate that Wolf fears the company might have trouble sustaining once it faces competition from iPhone 2.0 and the Android smartphones.

For a device that represents about 0.4% of the mobile handset market, the iPhone generates an awful lot of Internet traffic.

How much, you ask?

“Unheard of levels,” according an executive at O2, which on Monday announced plans to deploy a network of bandwidth boosting femtocells across the U.K. to handle the extra load. (see here)

And yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a Google (GOOG) executive offered a more precise measure. According to Vic Gundotra, head of the company’s mobile operations, Google is seeing 50 times more searches from Apple (AAPL) iPhones than from any other mobile handset.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” he told the Financial Times.

The FT notes that Google’s findings dovetail with earlier reports. In December, O2 reported that more than 60% of iPhone users use over 25mb/month of data, while only 1.8% of O2’s non-iPhone customers go over that mark.

Has Bill Gates learned the lesson of Zune?

Having gone up against the iPod with Microsoft’s (MSFT) MP3 player and failed to make much of a dent in Apple’s (AAPL) dominant share of the portable digital music market, Gates seems to be conceding the field for all-in-one devices to the iPhone.

Thompson Financial reports today that in an interview with a German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Microsoft’s chairman said he did not intend to make a combination cell phone/music player.

“No, we won’t do that. In the sector of such smartphones, we are purely concentrating on the software with our programme Windows Mobile.” (link)

That’s a strategy that will put Microsoft in competition more with Google’s Open Handset Alliance than with Apple’s iPhone.Of course, licensing high-margin operating systems and application software, and letting others duke it out in the cut-throat hardware markets, is how Microsoft made its first billions.

Here’s a fun exercise.

Do a Google search on the words “Gphone” and “two weeks.” You’ll get hundreds of thousands of hits, most of them saying pretty much the same thing: Google (GOOG) is about to unveil a cellphone that will change the world forever, or at least kill the Apple (AAPL) iPhone.

We’ve been skeptical all along, in part because Google has never shown any expertise — or interest — in building consumer electronics. And in part because the due date for the mythical Gphone was always shifting, always just a couple weeks or days away.

Today, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal — an assurance echoed by a hundred newsites that should have known better — was the day.

Did we get a Google phone? No.

What we got instead was a press release, a conference call, some self-indulgent videos, and a memo from Andy Rubin, the putative designer of the mythical phone (and hero of an adoring profile in The New York Times over the weekend), confirming what the naysayers have been saying all along: Google is not and will not be in the business of building phones.

What it’s offering — and trying to sell to the people who actually build the phones — is an operating system and some tools for writing cellphone applications. It’s a worthy enterprise and I wish them well. What it is not — as they are the first to say — is a Gphone.