GPhone Android

1. It’s open! The single best thing about Android is that’s a modern mobile phone OS that’s also almost completely open, unlike some other locked down mobile OSes. (There are a few restrictions in accessing the hardware for security reasons.) It’s based on Linux, and once Google has released Android, most of it will be totally open source, so it’ll be incredibly easy to dive into its guts and mess around, which will help build a robust developer community, along with all of the other benefits of using open software. Most of its other awesome traits grow out of its openness, actually.

2. We’ll keep the Steve references to a minimum here, but Android will accelerate the process that the iPhone helped kickstart last year—the gradual devolution of carriers to open, dumb pipes. Before, carriers controlled every single facet of what a phone could and could not do. They still do to an extent, and it’s not completely “anything goes” on the iPhone and Android, but together they have and will make the mobile landscape change far more rapidly than before. As Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner told me a few days ago, just a few years ago, carriers thought that the idea of full internet access was ridiculous, not to mention dangerous, threatening the obscenely lucrative business they have set up around minuscule bits of data like text messages, crappy “web portals” and ringtones. Android phones will be constantly connected and totally revolve around the internet, incessantly sucking down ever cheaper data—a carrier’s worst nightmare not so long ago.

3. You’ll have tons of hardware options. Android’s designed to be versatile, so lots of manufacturers will be putting it on lots of phones—ones with QWERTY keyboards, touchscreens, T9, outrageously spec’d out phones, as well as ones that are kinda crappy in the spec department, actually. But this also provides a common platform for developers, making it easy to put their apps on millions of phones. It’s the benefit of any OS that runs on a lot of hardware—like Windows or Linux, etc. Of course, this is also the Windows Mobile argument against all of the other proprietary OSes like Palm and BlackBerry.

4. There’s even more potential for amazing apps than the iPhone, because developers are almost completely unencumbered by arbitrary rules and restrictions. So awesome apps like Podcaster or Instictiv Shuffle won’t be mercilessly killed for not fitting into a tightly controlled framework or navigating a byzantine approval process.

5. It’ll have the best Google apps experience of any mobile device, and play super nicely with Gmail, Gcal, Maps and everything else Google puts out. Or at least it damn well better, since you know, it’s Google’s baby. Simple, direct syncing with Gcal is tops in our list, since doing it on the iPhone requires sacrificing a goat while chanting from a book covered in the skin of baby unicorns.