By Miguel Helft

O.K. There is no Google Phone. As we wrote a while back, Google is not building a phone. Instead, the company has teamed up with others in the wireless industry to create an open-source operating system, as well as other services, for mobile phones. Other companies, including Motorola, LG and Samsung, are expected to build phones based on this software.

While the project is called Android, everyone keeps calling it the GPhone or Google Phone.

For those curious about what the Android phones will look like, Google today has posted a couple of demos of their user interface and some applications. Remember these are demos, and no phones based on this software will be available for another eight months or so. But the demos are pretty slick, and they point to a class of phones that have the look and feel of the iPhone, with a touch-sensitive surface that allows users to scroll through Web pages by sliding a finger on the screen.

Clearly, Google is hoping to start building demand for these yet-to-be-launched products. Enjoy, then wait until the second half of next year for your Google Phone, er, Android Phone.

There’s actually a lot of good stuff going on at Yahoo, but there is also a tendency for the company to come off like a Google wannabe. Take this release: Yahoo! Launches New Program to Advance Open-Source Software for Internet Computing.

How many buzzwords associated with Google can Yahoo cram into one press release?

• Open source software
• Academic researchers
• Distributed file system
• Parallel execution environment
• Supercomputing-class data center

Cutting through all that, Yahoo is actually doing something interesting. It is giving Carnegie Mellon University access to a powerful cluster of computers. Here are the specs:

Called the M45, Yahoo!’s supercomputing cluster, named after one of the best known open star clusters, has approximately 4,000 processors, three terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of disks, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second (27 teraflops), placing it among the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world.

The point is to encourage research into the sort of problems that can be solved by a big network of machines, which, of course, is what Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are building their search and advertising empires on. Yahoo, which has somewhat less computer firepower than Google, is hoping that more of the software it needs can be created by the open source world, and moves like this may help it.

Even if it does run the risk of looking even more like a Google wannabe.