Android...

I ordered my G1 Android powered phone from T-Mobile on Monday morning, and it arrived Tuesday evening. First impression:WOW.

It's not the sea change that the iPhone was when it first came out. It is, however, a game changer. The iPhone represented a spectacular user interface change. Beautiful design and great engineering. But it didn't change the business. In fact, it reinforced Apple's control freak reputation. But the smart phone business was the same. You got your handset and all of the apps from one source. Android changes the landscape just a bit. Anyone can publish apps for the Android framework. This does mean there will be a lot of crap out there. But it also means there are a lot of choices. In less than 24 hours I've larded my phone with not one, but two bar-code reading shopping/price comparison apps (ShopSavvy and CompareEverywhere), a gas shopping/location app called GasBot (very good), a handful of games, a second media player (tunewiki), a settings manger that uses the phone's current location as a basis for changing settings (Locale), a picture editing/markup thingy called PicSay, and a unique, sort of weird but very cool navigation thingy called Breadcrumz. Breadcrumz allows you to use or create point of view 'directions'... One of the stock files shows the user how to get a great view of Jerusalem... by taking a few back alleys in the Old City.