Google’s new smartphone called the Dream is scheduled to be unveiled on September 23, followed by the gadget’s release on the market later on in October.

So far, the company has been fairly secretive about the device’s features, leaving everybody to wonder how the Android phone would outrun its main competitor, Apple Incorporated’s iPhone.

Nevertheless, recently leaked photos and videos have added some important pieces to the puzzle, offering quite a clear picture of what the Dream has in store for consumers. Fitted with a physical keyboard that slides from underneath the touchscreen, the smartphone enables users to run various apps simultaneously, allowing the latter to both view each other’s data and share information between them. This feature could pose a real threat to Apple’s product, since the latest update for the iPhone (the 2.1 one) has brought some security upgrades to the gadget, including a feature that prevents applications from viewing each other’s data.

Rumor has it that the Dream will also let users cut and paste text in emails, another feature that the iPhone lacks.

Moreover, the Android Market apps will be free of charge, as opposed to Apple’s ones and they are said to include BreadCrumbz, a picture-based navigation tool that focuses on user-created routes and TuneWiki, a music player that allows users to synchronize lyrics to a song’s video.

Google’s the Dream will be the first smartphone to run on the Android operating system, a software platform for mobile devices that was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, which is a consortium of 34 software, hardware and telecom companies.