No one outside the tech world knows or cares what Android is. Unless it's on a damn sexy phone it won't make a dent.

Son! Son!! I don't understand this android thingie you're talking about: where is the hard drive?

According to a Reuters September 23rd is when the first Android device comes out for T-Mobile.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/10/t-mobile-to-offer-android...

That's a really poor looking device. Regardless of the software, Android needs a design conscious handset in order to compete with Apple, HTC or RIM.

That is an HTC phone.

A friend who played with the new Android device say that there's no way it's comparable to the iPhone... but yes, this one device isn't what Android is about.

I played with both.

Android looks like a serious threat. The big question is how will google treat the Android developers.

Phone vendors don't like developers massing around with their devices, users do like it.

The vendor that will reach the finish line first will be the one that will produce a stable product with a solid API where 3rd party software won't damage the phone performance.

If my theory is correct at the moment RIM (Blackberry) are in front.

What happened with Palm, then?

Palm's products were stable, with a good developer environment, but the hardware itself started to look ancient compared to the PDAs that HP and others were offering at the time.

Seems like Palm did the software part great, and failed majorly on keeping the hardware up to date (they missed the boat or were late to the party on flash memory cards, color screens, and wireless, that I can remember anyway).

I disagree with almost every point. Palm had flash memory, color screens, and wireless before, or with, everyone else. (I do concede that they made incremental hardware "improvements" with every new Treo, instead of researching and adding innovative features.)

On the other hand, Palm did not add features to their operating system for what must be 7 years now. They did go up a version by adding 320x320 resolution support, but it was more of a hack than anything else. Each individual component (app, database) was still limited to 64k in size from what I recall. Palm was run by business people (more so than Android and the iPhone have since) who thought incremental updates of screen and camera resolution and doubling the onboard memory from 32MB to 64MB were good enough improvements each year.

Palm also did not have a Blackberry-like push e-mail app until maybe two years ago (and even that was because of a third party e-mail app; the default app that Palm owned and installed with every Treo did not even support IMAP.) But around the same time as adding IMAP support by purchasing the rights to a 3rd party e-mail client, they decided to start supporting Microsoft Exchange and running Windows Mobile on half of their new devices every year.

What happened? Apple fans originally loved PalmOS because it wasn't Microsoft. It was based on Apple's Newton. Secondly, the Palms worked better with Apple computers than Microsoft's devices did. Third, supporting the Palm could prevent Microsoft from dominating the mobile world on top of the PC world. Finally, Palm "sold out" and went with Windows Mobile, instead of improving or rewriting their aging operating system.

With the iPhone, Mac lovers could now get a real, current Apple product. I think that was the greatest gift to Mac users and Palm fans who were getting sick of Palm's insignificant incremental improvements.

Now if by software you mean the freedom anyone has to write and distribute a 3rd party app for a Palm device, then yes, they are still the easiest to release apps for. A developer doesn't need anybody's permission except that of the user themselves. But as far as the software PalmOS created and owned--such as the operating system and mail client--only minor improvements were made over the past seven years.

If I remember correctly there was a great deal of hope that Palm would turn-around when it acquired Be. They royally messed up the next-gen OS that they created using the BeOS/BeIA properties they acquired in a move that reminded me of Apple's Copeland fiasco.

It's been all downhill since.

I bet the first Android devices will be total crap.