Thank you; you are awesome!

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how are you finding the camera on the G1 so far? I heart my N95, but the lack of qwerty does drive me nuts a bit. it's going to be years before the N97 comes out on north american 3G, so I'm starting to think about the android....

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afaik there are no good cameras on phones in north america. Japan and Asia on the other hand... ;)

I'm really not a fan of HTC as a manufacturer, and the g1 is kinda plasticy. That said, android as a platform has been great, and for hacking it's been super breezey.

I just put the engineering bootloader (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=3008316 ) on my rootedg1 so in the not too distant future [i.e. once someone gets a developer g1 and dumps that os build] I'm sure I'll basically have the dev phone w/o spending $400. So it's been very pleasing to 1. see how easy it is to hack 2. see how many people have already done the minimal amount of hard work for you and told the community what to do.

There's work on an x86 port of android too, so hopefully somepoint in the future we'll see some netbookphone hybrid things. All of that points to it being a very successful platform.

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my north american N95 has a pretty serviceable 5MP camera... so there's at least one :)

can you write code in not-java on the rooted ones? it seems a silly question to ask, but the are pretty clear about JAVARR BEING THE ONE TROO LANGUAGE HURR on their site :/

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Not java? On the rooted ones, most definitely Yes! : http://www.saurik.com/id/10

Kinda outside the android land though, which means... well what you do on this device won't carry over to other android devices. That said, Hitachi demo'd SELinux+android running on a sharp zaurus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2yWDvcWu6I [how's that for weird combinations] so maybe other devices yield more interesting results?

It looks like getting linux running on an iphone will probably be a foot-in-the-door to get android running on the iphone as well [crazy ideas are crazy!]

The 3MP on the phone is meh, super slow focus. But my experience with all camera phones is meh. That said, your flickr pics look neato!

The n97 definitely looks neat, but $$$$$$$$

Also like, I don't know in other parts of the world (Japan, HK) phones are in many ways ahead of the game as far as hardware goes and features (e.g. dual sim slots, dual cameras [one for pictures one for video conferencing]). And they don't cost an arm and a leg.

I understand you dig phones. (: But for me this was less about getting a new gadget and more about getting something that would do stuff I wanted it to [e.g. sync gmail, calendar, contacts, good ssh client, solid web browser, be a good platform for future improvements]. I don't plan to replace this until it's dead, which is one of the reasons I'm hacking on it so as to make it maximally useful. Adobe porting flash to it is another good example that other people are jumping on and doing neat things with it. But as a device? Meh, not really worth buying right now if you already have something that is suitable.

There will be better android devices in the not too distant future I imagine. I don't see any harm in waiting to see what crops up in the near future. As a friend at google was telling me before the g1 was released [he was using a prerelease phone] the htc is kinda janky but the platform is what it's about, and it will be available on many more devices soon, including many devices which are already out [in fact many people were running android before the g1 was released on other htc devices].

It wouldn't surprise me to see android running on an n95 or n97 or whatever in the not too distant future even. ;)

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Oh, one more note about phones in the other parts of the world.

The iphone has been a huge dud in Japan, in no small part because it didn't support emoji [special emoticon character set] until the most recent firmware.

Similarly, Android as a platform isn't quite ready for asia yet. There's no IME framework. It's due out q1 2009, but even though you can display unicode, you can't enter it. You can copy & paste though! So, there have been a few apps in the marketplace which are basically redirect you to a webpage IME, then copy the unicode and then you can paste it into your sms or whatever. Super ghetto, but clever workaround for now (thanks to copy+paste abilities which iphone lacks ;). Still that, along with like, video calls aren't in android yet, nor is a solid bluetooth stack [they yoinked it from earlier sdk's because it wasn't cooked and they didn't want to be tied to the 1.0 release as the be all end all reference].

But that said, the platform of android is evolving and I'm sure will evolve even more rapidly as more people start using the dev devices and whatnot, so we'll see.

But compared to like 1mill iphones sold at launch, or 300mil apple app store downloads. The android hasn't had quite the robust release, but I think it will make up for it in time due to mass proliferation.

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all of the recent photos on my flickr were taken on my n95, for reference.

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