Opening

"It is worth making something open, immediately various possibilities arise."
Linus Torvalds, Just for fun

... the story, which began in 2007, will continue in 2008 as follows:

February 11, 2008, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​Google is going to occupy two stands. It is expected that the exhibition will feature the first real devices on Android.

On March 3, we will learn about the 50 most promising applications for the new mobile platform. Awarding the authors $ 25,000 will complete the first stage of the Android Developer Challenge .
In April, the Open Developer Summit will be held, where some developers are going to describe the most promising new products.
In the summer of 2008, we can be convinced of the existence of real Android devices, learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the experiment set by Google.

And after that we will get answers to the questions:
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What “new opportunities” will the joint work of the best programmers in the world bring us on a new mobile platform? Maybe it will be the tools to turn real queues in restaurants and shops into wireless queues , like those patented by Apple in the last week of December 2007? Or new medical diagnostic tools, such as an electronic stethoscope running a Linux clone µClinux?

Will the Google-magic of virtual worlds transform into the real world, will the “guys-who-everything-always-it-turns-on-the-net” be able to spur the development of offline technologies and sharpen the competition, as Apple did in 2007 — one of the main issues of 2008. Apple's iPhone-jerk ended with the emergence of multitouch and sliding (slide) interfaces, I want to believe that Google's technologies will bring not only joy to eyes and sensations, but also revolutionary capabilities for managing reality into the world.

The answers to these questions are not at all unequivocal: in December, the complaints of programmers became frequent, that “the development kit is devoid of functionality, poorly documented and has many bugs”. Developers are not satisfied, Google parries: at this stage, the platform does contain errors, but there are no more of them than any other software at such an early stage of development.
But, one way or another, “Google will take a lot of time and effort to improve the quality of the software before the devices hit the market.” Everybody believes in Google: despite possible difficulties, analysts at Strategy Analytics predict that Android will conquer 2% of the global smartphone market as early as 2008.

Obviously, living in the coming year will be interesting.
It will be interesting to talk about what is happening around - good, the tools for this are now available to everyone. But this is the beginning of the next story ...