We've started taking an initial look at building out some of our services for mobile devices. Spent some time last week evaluating iPhone application development, and though it supports web standards apps, the really nice apps are going to require customized development with a real Cocoa-based SDK (last word is that it won't be shipping until Spring 2008). It seems that iPhone as a development environment is already encumbered by Apple's insistence on being proprietary and somewhat close-minded.

Google's newly announced Android OS, on the other hand, is a true open source project, and they've even gone so far as to develop their own virtual machine in order to circumvent Sun's restrictions on applications developed with the JME. It also supports the latest whiz-bang mobile media and networking features right out of the box, and has improved on Sun's original Java mobile class implementation.

So I guess the real question for us is, will developers out there adapt Android over iPhone? It certainly seems likely that they will, given Google's track record and the fact that open software leads to open innovation.