Just spent a little time, about a half an hour, watching the android developer videos on YouTube. A few emotions (mostly awe and excite) and ideas things ran through my mind.

First, android is exciting. Google has done what Apple initially refused to do. That is .. allow developers to write apps and provide an SDK and documentation. Not only that but apparently they've spent a lot of time trying to make the APIs easy (relatively easy) for Java developers to use. They've provided details on their architecture, APIs and software stack. This is the kind of detail and tooling corporate developers want and need to enable in-house customized business applications. Nearly every corporate employee has a company supplied blackberry, pager or cellphone. The janitorial/engineering employees, bus drivers, secretaries and all the executives have devices. Some have several. One doctor I know has a phone a company provided blackberry and an iPhone (that he purchased). Other than email he uses no company apps on either device. Blackberries are great but there aren't great tools or many built in capabilities.

In stark contrast there is android. Third party commercial apps are encouraged. Corporate apps are enabled. The prize money is an awesome idea. This is the phone I can write apps for. This is the phone I want to write apps for.

Second, this is the phone I want to use. I've been a Palm user since the PalmPilot. Whats wrong with the Treo, Centro and TX? Lousy web browser. At best, Pocket Explorer is only moderately better. Anroid provides a great browser, based on webkit, which Apple uses for iPhone, that features touch scrolling and zoom. Just like the iPhone. 3D graphics and even a web history interface that looks exactly like iPhones 'coverflow'. Its ironic that the proprietary features that make iPhone great are freely available to third party developers from Google. Jobs must be hoppin' mad. I dont want a iPhone. This is the phone I want to use.

For Microsoft this whole thing has got to be embarrassing. The rumors on the blogs say the MS has known about most of this for more than a year. Pocket 6 has only moderate improvements and is not competitive with android. Anders and Erik need to figure a way to make C# and VB devs productive in the mobile space. MS loves a fight and Google has fired a devastating volley of strategic missles at Pocket PC land. The Pocket platform is going the way of Palm OS unless MS responds.

Symbian. Time to go quietly into the night or perhaps go cower in a corner. LG and Motorola two of Nokias big partners in Symbian are signed up for android. Realistically, small marketshare OSs with few apps are not gonna play well here. Apps are what make platforms. Not the other way around.

Sun ... shut up. So Google didn't go through the JCP first. So what? Apps that run on Java and apps written in Java are your friend.