Ladies and gentlemen, start your compilers...

Google is offering $10 million in prizes to developers that can write apps for the gPhone (now Android). I think that they may use the open-source licensing of the operating system to bundle some of the best apps with the phone. For example, the productivity apps item on the list seems mighty like some of the features on the iPhone, and I think that Google may decide to add a "your software is now open-source" clause to the prizes

Two other items also caught my eye. They are:

• Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos (emphasis mine)
• Gaming

If you are going to be doing editing on a mobile phone, or any mobile device, so help you god. It's hard, even with a touch screen. A phone is no place for image editing. The gPhone does run Linux, so it may be able to run the GIMP, though.

Quite frankly, and with regards to gaming: unless you are going to be playing tetris on this phone at super-sluggish phone speeds, this phone is going to have a dedicated video card. Just like the iPhone. And if you are going to do 3D games, you may need a better video card than the iPhone, because the iPhone does not have OpenGL. 2008: Who's phone has a bigger, better video card. This is something that the other phone providers are going to get in, like, 2012.

Overall, I immediately see one problem with the gPhone: some devices have touch screens and no keyboards, some devices have normal screens and physical keyboards, and some are abominations and have both touch screens and keyboards. Google's android website says that everything right down to the dialer is going to be able to be swapped out, so... are people going to be able to swap out the keyboard? Oh, and another thing: there is not going to be a version without the keyboard program customized for physical keyboard phones; Google chose to use the Apache license, which requires the whole project to be distributed. Oops.

I am planning to download the SDK as soon as I get my Linux Kernel working (it won't load right now; The recent xkcd comic makes me suspicious, although I think it was just an update), and I think some, if not all of my questions will be answered.