The GSMA Mobile World Conference in Barcelona unveiled the first mobile phones especially designed for Google’s Android operating system, an important step into bringing the facilities of a computer to a mobile phone and revolutionizing the mobile phone industry. At the same time, Google, already the world’s most used search engine, dears to challenge the “mighty” iPhone in an attempt to dominate the mobile phone market too.

The Android platform was officially launched last year, on November 5, as a result of a collaboration between Google and HTC, Intel, Motorola, T-Mobile, NVidia and Qualcomm, with one sole purpose: to develop open standards for mobile devices. Google is working on boosting the quality of Web browsing, enhancing the audio and video experience for mobile phones.

“What is happening with Android today is that we are seeing a number of technology companies demonstrating how Android will operate on their technology,” said Barry Schnitt, Google’s spokesman, to the AFP at the Mobile World Congress. There is still a long way to go before the prototypes will turn into definite handsets, but the first step looks promising.

ARM had already announced its presentation of a prototype phone based on the Android platform at Barcelona, and so they did, by using a 200MHz processor phone, able to make and receive phone calls, send SMS messages, browse the Web, play audio and video files and much more. As major developer behind Android, Google is also the main theme on the prototype phones: the browser home page was of course Google and the e-mail client was Gmail.

Monday’s demonstration came to show that the Android is perfectly capable of working amazingly well on very simple processors, and we can only imagine what more sophisticated devices would do. That should get Apple wondering for how long the iPhone will stay on top. Google estimates a device actually available on the market probably in the second half of this year, so iPhone, watch out, there’s a new smart device in town!