Google Phones Updated - 11/17/07

It just occurred to me that I never did post an update after the Google press release on it's new mobile phone platform. Well it turns at as speculated, that it is a platform (called Android) only and Google is working with phone manufacturers to develop mobile phones to run their platform. The sexy thing about it and why I think these phones will be a major competition to Apples iPhone is that their entire platform and SDK is all open source and is available for download now from my understanding. This essentially means that anybody can develop applications for the Google phone using a solid, open source foundation as their base. It supports OpenGL for 3D graphics and in the demo I saw, they were even playing a popular 3D fighting game - one that already exists for the PC platform. Pretty cool stuff me thinks. Man it must be exciting to work for a company like Google.

In the video I saw, there was one of the co-founders of Google talking about the platform then it went into a clip of a rep from the engineering department demoing what will be the "regular" Google phone as well as a touch screen version in similar fashion as the iPhone. Having not worked hands-on with either platform, I can't really do a full comparison but I think the Google phone will end up being the winner here. Now, hopefully, we can get our hands on these phones in Canada upon their launch (about 8 months).

I'll continue to post on this topic for anybody that cares as I find this really interesting. Heck, I might even learn the API myself and do a little coding.