The original designs for iPhones and Android devices looked quite different from what we know today. Fortunately, none of them actually hit the market.

Gone would be the giant touch screens and virtual keyboards we currently use. In its place, we would have been typing with Blackberry-esque physical keyboards and spinning classic iPod click wheels.

The blueprints for the original Android device concepts emerged during the ongoing Oracle trial. According to reports from the courts, the "Google Phone" would have been outfitted with a physical keyboard, a 200MHz processor, a 2-megapixel camera and QVGA display.

The people at Apple, meanwhile, considered an iPhone with a similar design to the classic iPod. Former Apple Senior Vice President Tony Fadell recently said the company had considered launching the iPhones with click wheels and a physical keyboard.

"The biggest problem with the 'iPod+phone' was we had a little screen and this huge hardware wheel," Fadell explained on an episode of the On the Verge podcast.

The time of the click wheel has long passed but it is interesting to imagine a world where the virtual keyboard never took off. Without touch screens we most likely would have never seen the giant and high definition displays we're used to.

So next time your writing an email on your iPhone or Android device just remember your experience could have been quite different.

SAN FRANCISCO: It's the end of day one at Oracle OpenWorld, and there's been a few highlights so far, namely the Big Data Appliance running on a NoSQL database, and the prospect of high level business intelligence tools via Exalytics. And depending on your sports preference, the appearance on stage of San Francisco Giants president Larry Baer giving Oracle chief Larry Ellison a World Series ring on Sunday evening.

However, the keynote sessions so far have not been that inspiring. Ellison used his Sunday night slot to drill down into some very technical detail on the Exa- line of products, punctuated only by his usual instruction to the PowerPoint manager of "next slide".

His comments about Oracle being the Apple of the enterprise world, IN that both firms marry hardware and software, were interesting, as was his promise to go after IBM in the server processor arena. But it was not a very uplifting session for the opening of a show that has attracted around 45,000 people to the Moscone Center.

On Monday morning, the prospect of Oracle president Mark Hurd was more enticing, as we waited to see whether the ex-HP chief would use his slot to carry on the slanging war between the two firms, or at least have a minor dig at his previous employer.

Although this didn't come to fruition, Hurd did promise to give an Oracle strategy update, which he then failed to deliver. Aside from the mention of Oracle's $4bn+ R&D spend per year, a 20 per cent increase in licences and the fact that 2012 will be all about the Exa- products, Hurd had little else to say. 

EMC must have been thrilled to steal Oracle's thunder at the show, with chief executive Joe Tucci and president Pat Gelsinger taking to the OpenWorld stage to tout the beta release of the firm's Project Lightning flash cards.

On Tuesday we have the prospect of Michael Dell and Oracle's John Fowler sharing a keynote slot. We'll keep you posted on whether Oracle livens up for day two of the show.

Java founding father James Gosling has decided to jump ship from Google just months after joining the firm when Sun Microsystems was taken over by Oracle.

Gosling, credited with inventing the programming language while at Sun, has decided to try his hand at something a little bit different, joining former Sun colleague Bill Vass at his new venture Liquid Robotics.

The company provides ocean-based robotic technology and cloud-based oceanic data-as-a-service, and is rapidly expanding having just secured $22m of venture capital funding, and went for Gosling as its new chief software architect.

Gosling described Liquid Robotics, which manufactured the world's first self-propelled marine robotic drone among other technology innovations, as "incurably cool".

"Liquid Robotics can totally change the way we look at oceans. We'll be able to get a wide variety of detailed data more cheaply and pervasively than any other way," he said.

"It involves a large data problem and a large-scale control problem, both of which are fascinating to me and have been passions of mine for years."

Why Gosling left Google after just over five months remains a mystery. After all, he must have been well aware of what he'd got himself into as Google was already involved in a lawsuit with Oracle over the use of Java patents in Android.

It remains to be seen whether the loss of Gosling will affect Google's ability to execute its legal strategy on the matter.

Most business intelligence (BI) firms talk up their mobile strategy in some shape or form, but one company is keeping notably quiet about its agenda, and that's Microsoft.

The small pure-play BI firms, such as QlikTech and Microstrategy, were the first to lead BI into the mobile sphere a couple of years ago.

Since then, many of the stack vendors have followed suit, most notably SAP with Business Objects Mobile in 2010, which is probably the most robust and pervasive mobile offering from all of the stack vendors, and supports the most mobile devices.

IBM follows closely with Cognos Mobile for the BlackBerry and the recent support it added for the iPhone at the end of 2010, while Oracle released Business Intelligence Mobile for devices running iOS earlier this year.

As each firm makes a mobile update, they are heralded as the only way forward for BI.

So what is Microsoft doing? Not much it seems.

Redmond's BI offering is available as part of the Office and SharePoint Server suites, and is built on the SQL Server platform, with Excel providing one of the main BI interfaces for users, as well as the dashboards from SharePoint Server.

When it comes to mobile, though, Microsoft BI runs only on the Windows platform, so that means compatibility with just Windows 7 devices.

Donald Farmer, the former face of Microsoft BI, who has now left to work for QlikView, said that when he left Microsoft in January this year the BI team was not thinking in mobile terms at all.

When asked what Microsoft's BI strategy involves, he replied: "Great question. I wish I knew!"

"Microsoft's mobile strategy is tied up with Windows 7. There was no mobile strategy that filtered down to individual teams while I was there. It's only such a large company that can release a product with no knowledge of its future strategy. You won't find Steve Ballmer losing sleep over BI," he told V3.

One customer, frustrated by Microsoft's lack of mobile strategy, has posted a comment on the company's BI Facebook page.

"What is Microsoft's mobile BI strategy? Please think beyond Windows 7 phones - it must work on all platforms," said Tricia Wilcox Almas.

"This trend is not going away and I need tools now. My clients will abandon their Microsoft bias if there is no offering and others are willing to fill in the gap!"

Microsoft told her that its strategy is to allow partners to build "a host of mobile apps to meet a variety of scenarios".

"You can expect more from us in the phone and slate form factors. More to come," the firm added.

Microsoft could not comment on its mobile BI strategy at the time this story was published, but it wouldn't be surprising to see the firm make an acquisition in the area to build out its capabilities.

Microsoft has hit back at Google in the rumbling dispute over patents which sputtered into life again yesterday after Google accused its competitors of deliberately gathering patents to throttle its Android mobile platform.

Google chief legal officer David Drummond launched blistering attack on Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and others for what he judged to be "a hostile, organised campaign ... waged through bogus patents".

This anti-competitive behaviour, he argued, included joining forces to snap up 6,000 patents from Nortel to make sure Google didn't get them, as well as "banding together to acquire Novell's old patents".

"We're encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms, and that it's looking into whether Microsoft and Apple acquired the Nortel patents for anti-competitive means," Drummond added.

However, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith hit back in a tweet, claiming that Redmond had reached out to Google over the Novell patents and in no way teamed up with Apple to deny the search firm.

"Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no," he wrote.

Interestingly, no word from Microsoft on the Nortel deal, however, which is currently being investigated for anti-competitive practices by the Department of Justice.

There's no doubt this isn't the last we'll hear, with some big name Android related patent disputes already working their way through the courts, and Google promising to strengthen its own portfolio of patents in the future.