Yeah, I was waiting with baited breath too. As a consumer I’m excited, as a technologist I’m interested and concerned at the same time, and as an entrepreneur I’m nervously optimistic and scared shitless at the same time. Here are my initial questions:

They mention LBS support, but how exactly will this be exposed? Will they pull the game-changing move of putting LBS info in HTTP headers?

What is going to be the policy of signed versus unsigned apps for the devices? If the devices encourage unsigned apps, what will the support be like from the carriers and handset manufacturers? It could get to be a nightmare if everyone is installing software from all over and their phones start acting weird. Just because the devices themselves are open doesn’t mean the carriers won’t lock them down – and if the carriers lock them and don’t encourage the real power features, your innovative apps get a smaller addressable market.

They say that their browsers will be “full power browsers”, but my full power browser on the desktop takes up an insane amount of memory for a mobile device. Which leads me to the question…

Are these phones going to only be high end smartphones? The high end is starting to converge with internet features as it is, so introducing another high end platform won’t help so much in that department. S60, WinMo, Symbian, PalmOS (*cough*) already let a good bit of innovation happen. The pain is getting innovative services to people with the affordable phones. Plus this could fragment the smartphone platform space even more. So it has the potential of not solving as many problems as it creates if manufacturers refuse to adopt.

I can’t wait to see the SDK. I wonder what UI tools they’ll give. GTK is nice and all, but certainly can’t compete with iPhone’s UI at this point. I’m curious to see what enhancements Android will add.

For the hackers and hobbyists, this is a great day. They just need some compatible hardware to run it on. I wonder how this will play out with Maemo? I bet many Maemo apps will be almost directly portable to Android, but will the developers stay with Maemo if the only mass market devices are the Nokia N-series tablets? Nokia did wonders building up Maemo, so will they gradually merge themselves with Android? Will they take too long and see a loss of developers to the platform?

Can’t wait to see how this plays out.