Just in case there are any rabid Google fans following the Google Phone / Android launch: we won't know for certain until we see the SDK, but on the face of it this doesn't look like a platform we're likely to support anytime soon.
The fact that it's open-source and highly customizable is actually a bad thing for our purposes, since it allows both mobile phone manufacturers and wireless carriers to essentially do whatever they want in terms of adding/removing libraries and features, requiring programs to be signed/certified, etc. Which is great for them, and will likely result in Android taking over a sizable portion of the low-end cell phone market, but is absolutely terrible for developers since it essentially means that we have to customize / tweak our software for every new Android-based phone that comes out, not to mention the paperwork/fees/etc if the carriers do start implementing their own signed code restrictions as we fully expect them to do. For a large software developer this might not necessarily be such a big issue, since the potential sales from any one of those carriers/phones might be enough to justify the expense of supporting it, but for us it's pretty much a deal-breaker.
Now I suppose Google could have some clever Java-based thing up their sleeves which would actually allow us to write just one or two versions of their software and be guaranteed that they'd run on any Android-based phone, but honestly I don't think even Google could pull that off - J2ME was supposed to be sort of like that too but companies that make software for J2ME phones still have to navigate that morass of different feature sets / libraries / resolutions / signing requirements / etc. There's just no way to give device makers and carriers that much freedom while still keeping a platform developer-friendly, and since Google's ultimately not that interested in binary application development anyway (their entire existence being built on web-based apps) I have a hard time believing they'd do anything to benefit developers at the expense of carrier control.
So the only three new mobile platforms we're seriously considering at the moment are iPhone, Symbian, and BlackBerry, and BlackBerry probably not before 2009 (when the code base should be stable enough that we can fork it off to do a Java port and then not have to update that port for a while). Still getting good signs on iPhone handwriting recognition, though, so 2008 could most definitely be the year of iPhone/S60 Pleco.
The fact that it's open-source and highly customizable is actually a bad thing for our purposes, since it allows both mobile phone manufacturers and wireless carriers to essentially do whatever they want in terms of adding/removing libraries and features, requiring programs to be signed/certified, etc. Which is great for them, and will likely result in Android taking over a sizable portion of the low-end cell phone market, but is absolutely terrible for developers since it essentially means that we have to customize / tweak our software for every new Android-based phone that comes out, not to mention the paperwork/fees/etc if the carriers do start implementing their own signed code restrictions as we fully expect them to do. For a large software developer this might not necessarily be such a big issue, since the potential sales from any one of those carriers/phones might be enough to justify the expense of supporting it, but for us it's pretty much a deal-breaker.
Now I suppose Google could have some clever Java-based thing up their sleeves which would actually allow us to write just one or two versions of their software and be guaranteed that they'd run on any Android-based phone, but honestly I don't think even Google could pull that off - J2ME was supposed to be sort of like that too but companies that make software for J2ME phones still have to navigate that morass of different feature sets / libraries / resolutions / signing requirements / etc. There's just no way to give device makers and carriers that much freedom while still keeping a platform developer-friendly, and since Google's ultimately not that interested in binary application development anyway (their entire existence being built on web-based apps) I have a hard time believing they'd do anything to benefit developers at the expense of carrier control.
So the only three new mobile platforms we're seriously considering at the moment are iPhone, Symbian, and BlackBerry, and BlackBerry probably not before 2009 (when the code base should be stable enough that we can fork it off to do a Java port and then not have to update that port for a while). Still getting good signs on iPhone handwriting recognition, though, so 2008 could most definitely be the year of iPhone/S60 Pleco.