So, I think that ultimately, the geekier types (not necessarily early adopter crowd manipulating types) will certainly like the platform. Having used previous Android devices, I can say that the user experience is NOT as straightforward and simple as the iPhone, even if it provides the same or more power under the hood.

Further, as a platform for selling applications, it's not good at all. Android Marketplace made less than 5% of what the iPhone App Store made, and, it's mostly filled with free apps. This is good for the consumer, until you realize that MOST of the free apps are garbage (because quality generally requires compensation), and thus, users feel like there aren't nearly as many excellent apps as the iPhone platform has. This leads to less people buying into the platform, and then, not feeding the marketplace, which leads to developers staying away from the marketplace.

IMHO, Google shot themselves in the foot with the Android platform when they made it a “runs on whatever device you want, and lots of free stuff, come get it geeks!” platform. I'd love to see 2.0 change this in some way though!

I think this statement is a little nonsensical. Surely the Android platform uses Linux at its core which is C/C++ based, and to quote the Android docs:

“Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework.”

Now I know that application code for the devices *is* written in Java, but then the Java class files are then converted to a special executable format for the Dalvik VM, which is distinct from the Java VM, before running on the device.

All that aside, the blanket statement “Java is notoriously slow”, doesn't make sense in and of itself. Don't get me wrong, there are lot of reasons to dislike aspects of Java the language, but Java the VM has had a ton of work done on it, and is plenty fast

So, I think that ultimately, the geekier types (not necessarily early adopter crowd manipulating types) will certainly like the platform. Having used previous Android devices, I can say that the user experience is NOT as straightforward and simple as the iPhone, even if it provides the same or more power under the hood.

Further, as a platform for selling applications, it's not good at all. Android Marketplace made less than 5% of what the iPhone App Store made, and, it's mostly filled with free apps. This is good for the consumer, until you realize that MOST of the free apps are garbage (because quality generally requires compensation), and thus, users feel like there aren't nearly as many excellent apps as the iPhone platform has. This leads to less people buying into the platform, and then, not feeding the marketplace, which leads to developers staying away from the marketplace.

IMHO, Google shot themselves in the foot with the Android platform when they made it a “runs on whatever device you want, and lots of free stuff, come get it geeks!” platform. I'd love to see 2.0 change this in some way though!

I think this statement is a little nonsensical. Surely the Android platform uses Linux at its core which is C/C++ based, and to quote the Android docs:

“Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework.”

Now I know that application code for the devices *is* written in Java, but then the Java class files are then converted to a special executable format for the Dalvik VM, which is distinct from the Java VM, before running on the device.

All that aside, the blanket statement “Java is notoriously slow”, doesn't make sense in and of itself. Don't get me wrong, there are lot of reasons to dislike aspects of Java the language, but Java the VM has had a ton of work done on it, and is plenty fast