In a on Saturday morning, Google said the phones are being distributed so that workers can experiment with new mobile features. It did not say the device will be a Google-branded phone.

But in a Twitter message earlier, a Google employee who said she has the phone referred to it as a "Google phone," fuelling the latest speculation.

Since even before Google unveiled Android, onlookers wondered if the search giant would release its own phone. Instead, it released an open source operating system that other hardware vendors can use to make phones.

In the Google blog post, Mario Queiroz, a vice president of product management, said the company gave the phone to employees as a way to test new technologies.

"We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe," he wrote. "This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it."