Has anyone here played with an OpenMoko ? I have examined one, but have so far avoided putting out the cash to buy one.

I have always disliked the cultist and elitist aspects of Job's company. I see Apple as no better, and possibly worse, than Gate's company.

I think, that if you are trying to make money to live the next 3 years comfortably, writing iPhone apps may be the way to go; but if you want there to be a world where your great-grand kids live comfortably writing apps for an open tri-corder from their apartments in a Stanford torus at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, then you write apps for the OpenMoko and feed yourself with a day job.

Android is like OpenMoko but with a chance that anyone will ever own a compatible handset.

Android FTF. I used it, and it was pretty terrible. If you think the iPhone is slow...

Maybe we should give it a chance to launch and iterate a bit.

You're talking to an audience of people that decide something's win or fail the day it comes out. Good chance being persuasive here, even if your point is accurate.

And comparing these two services is stupid. They're entirely different, they have two different business strategies. Apple and Google are not competing directly, and that'll be reflected in the developers who flock to either side (or to both).

Yeah, of course. But it was very slow. And the interface wasn't nearly as polished as the iPhone's. I don't know how much iteration will help them.

Being on a phone with a dedicated keypad will help more than any software. Android's strength is largely not software. The software only has to be passable, and there's no way the Alliance will let it not be that.

Are you serious? All Android is is software. It just happens to support a lot of different types of hardware, and the first phone has a dedicated keyboard. And saying it will help more than anything is certainly a matter of your opinion.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the experience-- a combination of the software, the hardware, and the network.

It's mostly hardware/network though. People buy phones for many different reasons, which necessitates many different form factors. For instance, someone who actually used their phone as a phone would be ill-served by an iPhone, but not by some Android units. Same with people who do a lot of emailing/texting.

So I didn't really mean the keypad specifically.