[miffed]

I love the way this platform has shaken things up ! Specifically in terms of who the "players" are in the game

Recently I have been quite frustrated by the fact that the whole smartphone thing is a one horse race , with the iPhone being king of all it surveys ! (Deny it if you like ..... but search your inner feelings , you know it to be true)

...... Hadn't even realised it was happening , But in the run up to buying my latest handset (HTC Desire) I found myself legitimately comparing phones made by Samsung (!) , Sony Erricson (!!) MOTOROLA (!!!) - It was like going back to the good old days !

If only Nokia could swallow their pride ,and accept they are never going to "fully bake" an OS ? I think we could see a very special device from them, Can't see it ever happening though unfortunately :(

Going back a few years , at the top of the tree we had Symbian S60 & Windows mobile - and for all intents and purpose each would try to ignore the other , Now things are VERY different ,and we are seeing a real battle betwen OSX and Android , one day I turn on the laptop and see Apple are making quantum leaps , the next day it is suggest Android Froyo is going to leapfrog OSX 4.0 !!!

I love it !!! and so should all the manufacturers - as it means the likes of Motorola et al have a hope in hell of launching "relevant" handsets again , thanks to Android , Thanks to OSX !

[Hands0n]

I also was taken with Android when I first clapped eyes on production models using Cupcake as it was then. Although a bit basic by today's Eclair standard and with hardware to match, there was a lot of promise, although a fair bit of it was lost because of inadequate hardware.

But with the advent of the latest from HTC (Nexus One, Desire etc.) the whole notion has taken on a new life, and a good one it is too. Further hardware improvements in terms of RAM and processor speed and capability will only be for Android's betterment. I can hardly wait.

What holds Android back ever so slightly against the icon that is the iPhone is the available apps in Market. There is no doubt that Android developers are getting better, but it still feels like they are the 18 months behind the Apple platform that the hardware has been. The quality of the apps can be highly variable, and I do feel that the "look and feel" of the apps in Android is not quite as polished as we see on the iPhone itself. In part, a large part, I put this down to the quality of the SDK which, in Apple's case, is light years ahead of the Android SDK. I have used both, and there is no comparison, the iPhone SDK is as polished as you would expect any Apple product to be these days. Not only that, but it is highly capable, much more so, and very advanced even in general SDK terms. By contrast the Android SDK feels like a hackers tool, almost like the difference between an early Linux OS and Windows or OS X. Great if you like that sort of thing, if you want to have to bury yourself in command lines and hand-tooled UIs for your apps. I'd compare it with CP/M Wordstar vs MS Office.

Perhaps this is Google all over. Great ideas partially implemented, only sufficient to allow the designers and developers to move on to the next "toy" project. But with Android they really shouldn't do that - because for the first time they are dealing with the fickle masses. Right now those masses are being attracted to the Android experience, in great part supported by the mobile network operators who, lets face it, are only after your ARPU no matter how they get it.

I do think that OS X and Android will share a coalition "government" over the lesser Windows Mobile and almost now irrelevant Symbian OS which will probably continue to exist of course. But the public's imagination has been captured not by those two dinosaurs who had their chance and squandered it. Rather, it is the two newest entrants who have completely stole the show.

Me too. I love it, and can hardly imagine a parallel universe where OS X and Android never existed, one where WinMo and Symbian still ruled from their rested laurels.