2008 started with a wealth of new experiences and opportunities for me.  Moving from the east coast to join the Rapidparts team, purchasing a home, and oddly enough what turned out to be one of the more difficult tasks was buying a new cell phone.  Until recently I was using an old company Blackberry.  It was ok for getting email and finding some small gems of info on the mobile web browser, but I was excited about the idea of one day buying my own super cell phone.  It had been over 5 years since the last time I purchase a cellular phone.  Back then your choices were mostly limited to phones with two line, one ‘color’ LCD screens and nothing to speak of by way of multimedia support or cameras.  With today’s polyphonic ringtones, Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and 8.1 megapixel camera enabled phones, I figured that I would have my work cut out for me. 

So, the day came when my wife and I made our way to the local Verizon store and began sifting through the walls of inventory.  It wasn’t long before I realized that there really weren’t any great deals out there.  Sure some phones could play mp3’s and some were GPS enabled, but the nicer feature-packed smart phones required you to shell out some serious dough just for the ability to expand the lackluster interface.  You want integrated maps – that will cost you extra.  You want an email client - sure for $4.99/month.  Every feature that was integrated in to the phone to make it a better value just ended up being locked out by the service provider.

Enter Android.  Android is the new mobile operating system developed by Google that’s slated to appear in second half of this year.  It’s like having an incredibly small toy box that somehow contains all the toys you’ve ever wanted.  Moreover, you somehow have all the appendages necessary to play with as many of these toys as you want - all at once.  That is what Android feels like.  It’s not a phone, but it’s a promise that whatever phone it’s running on will be able to do more.  Recently Google shelled out almost 5 million in awards to developers who submitted new and original ideas for breakthrough mobile apps.  Round 2 of this contest begins later this year.

http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

I’m excited about getting an Android enabled phone when they come out.  I’m even more excited about the chance to create my own applications to make use of all the features of the underlying hardware.  Thanks Google, but I guess in the meantime I’ll settle for my hampered LG9900 with locked down GPS/mobile Web features, 2.0 Mega pixel camera, and a load of other cost-based inabilities and short comings.

http://code.google.com/android/