Happy Monday and welcome to GooglePhoneManiaWeek.

Want photos? Aaron beat me to 'em, so check out his post.

The latest from sources I trust enough to pass along to you. Again, none of this has been verified by Google, HTC, or T-Mobile, but I'm pretty sure this is all going to go down in a manner fairly similar to the following:

• Google will sell the phone - the "Nexus One," as it's being called for now - direct via online orders starting January 5, 2010.
• The device will be sold both by Google and T-Mobile.  T-Mobile will offer the phone at a subsidized price for customers willing to sign a two-year contract.
• The phone will be an unlocked GSM device with 3G banding suitable for T-Mobile USA and Global networks. The phone will be EDGE-only on AT&T in the US.
• The phone will sport an AMOLED touchscreen display measuring approximately 3.7"  Best I can tell, those tweets about the device being "smaller than a Hero," were wrong - or possibly referred to the phone's thickness.  A few sources have told me the phone looks and feels, "Like a Droid without the keyboard."
• The phone will feature a scroll ball and touch sensitive controls beneath the display.
• The phone will ship with Android OS 2.1, which adds the following to OS 2.0.1 (as seen on Moto's Verizon Droid):
  • More desktops, which will be navigable via "WebOS-style cards," or thumbnails, on the home screens
  • Enhanced voice-to-text input across much of the OS (possibly available wherever a virtual keyboard can be used)
  • Google Goggles pre-installed
  • New/refined UI elements featuring 3D graphics
  • Animated wallpapers on the home screens

Obviously there's a ton that we're not sure of, and everything I just wrote could turn out to be wildly inaccurate. Rumors, people, rumors. But, again, I've gathered enough similar information from a few trusted sources - and that info lines up with much of what we're all reading on other sites today - that it's worth printing.

To me, the big question isn't about the specs and such, though.  To me, the big question - or questions - is about the business model: Is this truly going to be a device that attempts to change the way Americans, in particular, consume and pay for mobile voice and data, or is this going to turn out to be basically "just another HTC-made Android phone on T-Mobile," that can also be used on AT&T if you're willing to live with EDGE-only data? 

Nexus One with T-Mo 3G selling for $500 unlocked sounds an awful lot like a Nokia N900, in terms of the business model.  Yawn.  Not yawn at either phone, but yawn at high-priced unlocked smartphones because they haven't done much to shake things up in the US. 

Nexus One (with a better name!) selling for $199 unlocked because Google wants to get all crazy and get this thing into as many people's hands as possible? Unlikely to happen, sure, but it'd make for quite a story to kick off 2010.

Oh, for the record, a T-Mobile spokesperson gave me the expected, "We don't comment on rumor or speculation."