@Larry And I go to Digg for the smart ass comments.

I will give Dan one thing, he’s not a total jackass tool like Mike Arrington.

I agree with you. I used to come here and read some quality stuff, but now it seems like a personal blog where they post their bias towards a product, or even ask if a certain service is offline. That would be a post for a forum, not a blog entry. I rarely come here anymore, another reader lost.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080819-robotripping-hands-on-with-the-android-sdk-beta.html

Secondly, Android phones don’t need to be at the top of the cellphone food chain to make a difference. I’d expect iPhone, Blackberry and some various WiMo phones to dominate the high-end for a while, but low and midrange phones will get eaten up by Andriod. Think about it: the cell phone manufacturers are spending lots of money right now either developing the OSes for these phones or buying the OS from one of a handful of companies. Having a shared, open OS will mean their development costs will be dramatically reduced. And the features that andriod will support will be vastly superior to the low/mid range phones out there. The bar is going to be drastically raised as to what normal, everyday people expect from their phones.

Whether or not Android succeeds in the high-end market will depend much more on the cell phone manufacturers being able to design sexy and functional phones as much as Android being good software. I’m not worried about iPhone being able to compete at all. Steve has some tricks up his sleeve, I am sure. But between Android and iPhone, all the other manufacturers had better start competing!

As for the huge consortium of companies behind this… Doesn’t matter. Can you name one consortium of companies that has ever produced anything useful? You create a consortium when you’re getting beat by another company and you can’t catch up. So you band together and create a huge bureaucratic committee of you and the other failed competitors who can’t keep up. Design by committee? Yeah right. That’s going to work well.

What it boils down to is Android is backed by a massive company capable of dumping billions of dollars into it’s development and growth… it’s licensed under the Apache, and GNU licensing… meaning A. it’s free (as in speech) B. it’s distributable by a third party or strict 3rd party license … meaning you could have Android Nokia… or Android Motorola… Android Palm even. This gives great flexibility but standards and concise project management (Google runs shit at the core loosely … think Linus to the Linux kernal). Now you have a platform backed by a bunch of money with the freedom to do whatever you wish. Sounds like a nightmare right… will never work…. just like Ubuntu… ohhh wait.

The fact that it’s built on Linux alone is enough to make me swoon over it. Instantly with a little portability changes you have millions of potential apps and functionality just waiting to be unleashed.

Bottom line… they’re late, just like Apple was… Android is going to be what powers the iPhone killer… if I’m wrong you can point and laugh… give if 3 – 5 years and see who the dominate cell phone OS is in the market.

If you recall Google was late to the search engine game… askjeeves, yahoo, msn, dogpile, altavista… they were all top dogs before our little Google pals came up with a great idea and decent algorithm.

It is yet another disturbing force in the cellphone industry.

Again Matt, I would love to eat my words.