The Droid phone will be out this friday. It is the competition for the Iphone. It has at the moment over 10,000 apps which I am sure will grow quite rapidly. Can this forum be used for this phone also?

Ofcourse!

Here's some interesting stuff about Droid -
First Review
http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10385261-251.html
Commercial
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-103774......ncol;txt
Interesting comparisons
http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-1026727......ncol;txt

I love my Droid. I just hope there are some good magic apps for it soon.

I also love my Droid Eris. Hope to see some cool magic apps for it soon!

This is probably a stupid question, but can any of the iPhone magic apps work on the droid?

Im going to say no. Purely because the iPhone apps are made using Apples SDK (software development kit), and Apple don't like sharing!

No, they can't. It is more than a matter of installing it on the phone. The app has to be developed specifically for the operating system that it is intended to run on. It would be like trying to install a Mac application on a Windows machine.

The knock Apple usually gets for "controlling" the environment on it's systems has paid off so far with the iPhone. By controlling the hardware and OS and instituting strict standards for SW developers, the user experience can be common across apps. The Google open based OS on the Driod phone from Motorola has promise, but when the environment is shaped by the hardware maker, an evolving OS and then the carrier who tends to limit versions, it will be interesting to see how it all shapes up.

I really hope someone will step up to the plate on this one.

YES! I have found only one and it's horrible.

Here is a quote from a recent article following CES 2010:
"Not even 2 years old, Android is already a poster child for the fragmentation stymieing the development of software applications for smartphones."

An app developer myself I can tell you that systems whose biggest apps get 60 downloads per day are at a loss against iPhone's thousands of downloads per day for the better sellers. Best sellers do even better than that.

It is simple economics which any of the iPhone killers must overcome.

You hit the nail on the head, Tom. The sheer popularity of the iPhone is a huge draw and the momentum it has cannot be ignored.

Even with newer phones like the Nexus One with a few better features (higher rez screen, etc), the UI experience and "snappiness" still falls short from what Apple released last June.

The competition are still playing catch up and with the rumored release of the Apple's tablet and iPhone OS 4.0 SDK in just over two weeks, Apple will jump even further ahead, cementing their two-year head start on the competition.

These are the main reasons (plus the fact that programming in Objective-C is just plain fun) that I will stick with iPhone programming and not even bother writing for Android, RIM's Blackberry, or Palm's webOS.

On a side note, I find it funny how so many new smartphones are hyped as being THE "iPhone killer" only to fall so short. I love competition. It helps us, the consumer. But it looks like the only phone that ever turns out the be an "iPhone killer" is the next release of the iPhone.

Doesn't google pay developers just to develop apps even if people are not buying your app? Maybe I'm wrong.