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Google Android has three main features for develops:

Integrate – lets you use existing Google code, such as Maps, and share data, for example between the browser and Google Maps.

Extend – lets you build on existing Google apps, such as Google Maps, and enhance their functionality. The example shown lets you use Google Maps to locate taxi cabs near you. The app uses the built-in Google Maps app and extends it, adding its own functionality on top of Maps to create a brand new app.

Replace – you can easily replace components. For example, if you don’t like the existing contact manager, you can replace it with a different one from a third party. Not just add a new contacts manager, but completely replace the default one that Google provides.

This makes developing apps much easier, and should let the end user customize their phone to the n-th degree, and get access to a rich ecosystem of new apps that will constantly be developed.

I’m live here at Google I/O at the first Google Android session. So far we’re going fairly tecccie into the software guts of Android, which I appreciate some of you may not be that interested in, but we’ve been promised the latest news on Android at the end of the session – watch for a separate post on that in about 40 minutes’ time or so.

In the meantime, for those of you interested in Android under the hood, there’s loads more info after the jump.

Google have been showing off more of the Google Android mobile platform at the Google I/O conference at San Francisco, which just happens to be where I am now! A working model of an Android handset has just been shown, and it look fantastic. Of course it comes with a touchscreen – what mobile phone doesn’t these days. But the ease of use of the touchscreen rivals iPhone in terms of its ease of use and genuine capability.

Google have attempted to replicate the desktop on the mobile phone. An Android phone lets you create shortcuts to your apps just like you can on the desktop. You can move your icons around on the desktop with your finger, and switch between different running applications just by touching your finger on the screen and swiping it left and right. There’s a status bar at the top of the screen that provides common functions to your phone. Simply place your finger on this bar and drag it down, and a new screen slides down showing all the main functions of your phone.

Android phones use the WebKit browser, but not just for viewing web pages. You can use what Google calls Views to create new apps using the functionality of WebKit. So you get the browser view, for example, and the Maps view, which obviously lets you work with Google Maps.

And it’s the maps that brought the biggest round of applause at today’s opening keynote. Not only was an Android handset shown with standard Google maps on it, in both map and satellite view (both of which rendered very quickly); Google also demonstrated StreetView on an Adroid handset. StreetView, for those who don’t know, is Google’s technology that lets you see photos of a city or town. Not just any photos – they’ve taken literally millions of photos of inidividual locations, letting you scroll forward and move left and right 1 metre at a timne, effectively seeing what the place looks like through a series of photos.

What Andoid adds to the mix is GPS and a compass. Yes, just like Nokia’s forthcoming 6220 Navigator phone, Google’s Android handsets will come with compasses. One was demonstrated with a compass built-in. Google StreetView was called up, with a photo of the street being displayed. As the phone was turned left and right, so the photo turned left and right in real time. This brought a huge round of applause, and looked seriously cool. You can literally move around a city thousands of miles away in real time just by moving around with your Android phone in your hand.

Imagine how useful this could be. Like the look of a hotel in a brochure? Great, but as we all know, brochures are never exactly accurate! What’s next door, for example, or round the corner? With StreetView and an Android phone, simply locate the hotel and get a picture of it. Turn round with your phone in hand, and see a 360 degree sweep of what’s around it. Move forwards and backwards, and see what buildings (or building sites!) are to the left and right of it. How close is it to the beach? Have a walk and find out!

Android looks glorious. It works as well as the iPhone, it’s more functional than the iPhone, it’s entirely open source, and it’s going to be a hugely disruptive technology. I could be being blinded by the Google hype, but I really do think I’ve just seen the future!

I’m now attending the dedicated Google Android track, and will have more updates for you shortly. Oh, an dloads of Android pictures too!

I’m off on my hols again, so posting may be a bit light for the next few days. One place I’m off to, though, is Google I/O, Google’s developer’s workshop in San Francisco that starts next week.

Among the things being discussed will be Google Android, so I’ll be able to report back with the latest news on Google’s open mobile phone platform straight from the horses mouth, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out our archives and have a wander through the thousands of posts and articles on mobile phones that I’ve written over these past few years.

Forgive the alliteration of the title, but new crystal clear pictures of the Sony Ericsson P5i (currently codenamed Paris) have been posted on the mobile-review forum. The launch date for the P5i isn’t known yet, but given the amount of leaks coming out of Sony Ericsson at the moment (for which I truly thank them for ;) and the finished looking quality of the phone, my guess would be…tomorrow!

There’s been a mixed reception to the P5i so far. On the one hand, its specification looks rather tasty. aGPS, 5 megapixel camera, and a boatload of other stuff as well (full spec after the jump). However, Gliatiotis, the mystery poster whose username sounds like a lethal version of bad breath, is not exactly raving about it:

“To be honest after seeing that there has been almost no changes at the hardware level, I am not that interested to play around with it and it will probably end up next to G700 and G900,” he says in his post, somewhat sullenly!

We’ll reserve judgment until the P5i is finally released. Meanwhile, check out the specs and more pics of the Sony Ericsson P5i after the jump.

Nokia have been showing off their Nokia 6210 Navigator at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, and we’ve compiled some great video reviews of it. The 6210 Navigator, as you can probably guess, is a GPS phone, but as the videos show, it’s not just any GPS phone – it’s so advanced and the detail of its maps is so precise, you couldn’t actually get lost anywhere on earth with it! No, seriously. Even if the maps of your present vicinity aren’t so hot, you’ll at least know which way the nearest town or road is. How? Because the 6210 Navigator comes with a built-in compass and accelerometer, as well as GPS.

This means that not only does the phone know exactly where you are, it also knows the direction in which you’re pointing. This last step is hugely significant, as it means that the map is constantly oriented in the direction in which you’re travelling, rather than always pointing up to North. You no longer have to work out whether to turn left or right when facing south; nor will you get confused with which way you’re pointing on a featureless map.

Better still, it’s not just abstract lines of maps that the 6210 displays. You even get the option of viewing full satellite photos of your surroundings, which also turn as you do. Like I said, you really can never get lost with this thing!

More details of the Nokia Navigator 6210 GPS phone after the jump.

Nokia has made certain attempts to encroach on Google’s territory over the past few months – or, rather, what it sees as Nokia territory. Take mobile advertising, for example. Nokia will ship over 35 million GPS-enabled mobile phones this year alone, each of which is capable of supporting location-based mobile advertising. This just happens to be fertile Google territory, as the search engine giant sees all forms of online advertising as its own, and location-based mobile advertising in particular is estimated to be worth billions in the near future.

Google may have the advertising prowess, however, but what it doesn’t have is control over the devices that will ultimately deliver mobile advertising. Step forward Nokia, who not only have the devices equipped with GPS, they’ve also just bought NavTeq, the mapping company that powers many of the world’s Sat-Nav systems and mapping software, including – yup – Google Maps!

Now this is where it gets really interesting. Nokia has been showing off a Google Maps-killer called Maps on Ovi at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco that by all accounts makes Google Maps look like a dinosaur. Unlike Google Maps, which does all the processing on the server, Maps for Ovi is vector-based and does all the processing on the client – making its response time much faster.

Couple this with Nokia’s latest handset the Nokia Navigator, which comes with a built-in compass, and Nokia’s place in the location-based market suddenly looks a lot stronger than Google’s. Nokia are even releasing a series of APIs for Maps on Ovi, enabling anyone to create their own applications for it that will work not just on PCs, but on any Nokia device capable of supporting the new mapping service.

“Yelp is just a mashup. Twitter is just a mashup. If they want to make their applications work with our APIs, great,” said Nokia VP, Michael Halbherr. “But Google is our competitor.”

Disappointing news reaches us that Nokia will not be updating the glorious-looking Nokia N93 any time soon. In fact, the marvellous twisty form-factor will not be used on any new Nokia phone until at least 2010. This is sad, as the N93 was genuinely innovative and really makes the phone stand out head and shoulders above its competition.

The N93 was one of the first N-Series phones, and really helped established the brand as cutting edge. With its mix of shapes that it could pull, you were never entirely sure whether it was a phone, a camcorder or a PDA, but that was part of its appeal. Indeed, the form factor was validated by the fact that many new dedicated camcorders now sport a similar look. Sadly, though, Nokia has decided to leave the design to them, and have deemed it either to be too unwieldy or simply too fat for a mobile phone.

I guess this is only to be expected, as the recent trend has been for phones to slim down. By 2010, though, we can expect all of the technological marvels that were squeezed into the N93 to be small enough to fit into a device with a similar form factor, but that is much smaller, which I guess is good news. Until then, it might not be a bad idea to snap one of these beauties up either new or on EBay, as if ever a phone was destined to be a collectible, the N93 is it.

[Source: The Nokia Blog via BoyGeniusReport]

What do you do when you get your hands on five of Nokia’s shiniest top-end N-Series phones all at once? Review them all, of course, and take tonnes of pics of the buggers! And that’s just what the PhoneReport has done, lining up the Nokia N95 8GB, N78, N82, N81 8GB and (gasp!) the brand new Nokia N96.

Phew! As you can see from the pics (and they have dozens more on their site), it’s quite an impressive line up, and the review makes for interesting reading if you’re considering buying one of Nokia “multimedia computers”. Frustratingly, the review isn’t all that in-depth, covering only the dimensions and usability of the phones in terms of their form factors and a bit of the user interfaces, but a fuller review is promised sometime in the future.

More pics after the jump.

It’s no secret that Motorola’s handset division has been in trouble for some time, but things are starting to look extremely perilous for the former number one hadnset manufacturer. After recording record losses when other companies have reported record profits, losing the number two slot to Samsung, and talking about possibly selling off the loss-making handset division as a separate company, the last thing Motorola needs is for a large international telco to drop its products.

So guess what T-Mobile, the large international telco, has just done? Yup, shelved the launch of the Motorola Z6w, which it was set to carry this summer. Ouch! The Z6w was a weak phone, to be sure, with Wi-Fi and precious little else. Certainly it was years behind its competitors, and it didn’t have the style or even the rapidly-fading cache of the RAZR.