Android and the future of phones

I have always been a clown of sorts, sometimes it takes longer for people to discover that side of me. When it comes to work I try to be pretty mellow and straightforward, but something that I have always loved doing is communicating with people. Okay, now that I have stumbled over the first few sentences let me spit it out, my phone (Blackberry 8330/Sprint) allows me to communicate with people like I never have before.
Back in school I talked to most people in person, I said hi, they said hi, it was awkward sometimes, but that was life. I really do not remember many people having cell phones (I graduated in 2000), but I do remember calling my friend Sergio on his home phone every morning to see if he was ready to go to school. Some days he was, some days he wasn't, but we usually managed to get to school on time everyday. 
Then I got a job, I always swore to myself "I am not getting a cell phone, if they need to reach me, oh well". Then I am not sure what happened, but I eventually got one. I think the first cell company I had was Alltel. All I used my phone for at the time was to talk. I really liked them, but I had an old school phone after two years and I wanted something different.
After Alltel I had the good old AT&T for a short time. I made calls and dropped calls and then dropped a few more calls. It sucked. Now that was the first time I liked my phone, it had a screen with colors on it, and it had Tetris which I am a gangster at. I eventually got tired of having horrible service in a relatively large city, El Paso (one of the top 20 cities in the country by population believe it or not).

Next was where I am at now Sprint. Sprint used to be like the top tier of cell phones and I had a cool phone with a retractable antenna. The phone had animated National Geographic screens, a web browser, and the now extinct short code messaging (basically text via web that was horrendous). The phone was a soldier and it worked in most places. To this point my phones were all similar with a minor evolution happening from my first phone to my third.
After some time PDAs like Palm started gaining popularity. We have Blackberry in the game and eventually we have Windows Mobile and iPhone. If you have ever gone from a regular phone to one of these devices it is a good difference. You can play more media files (you can do that now with dumb phones), e-mail, games, camera (usually), and so on. 
Android is one of the most recent editions to the Smartphone market, and I think with help of the iPhone, Android is going to change the market the most. We all know there is one iPhone and it is with AT&T and unless you unlock the phone that is pretty much it. The iPhone has been so important in the market because it has really helped close the gap between high end customers and business customers. With the fairly reasonable price it has allowed some lower and medium tiered customers to enjoy a phone other than the basic phones they are used to.
I think Android is building on this. I think Android has a similar application based platform that is evolving faster than iPhone and Google is not limiting themselves by being only available to GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile. They recently (today) launched the HTC Hero for Sprint customers and some Verizon Android phones should be coming very soon. 
They are launching to multiple carriers, that along with having a solid partnership with HTC (who wants to become bigger in the United States and is making the push to make that happen), and a budding partnership with Motorola and LG could make them huge. 
I think in the next two years the major manufacturers like LG, Samsung, and HTC will load this is a default into carrier operating systems, it is just a theory, but I am going with that. You may have a Sprint flavor of Android with pre-installed apps and themes out of the box, but you will probably be able to replicate the Verizon or ATT equivalent. I know this was no Farmville, but until next time. 
Oh yeah, back to the clown thing. With my Blackberry I can go to Myspace and communicate with my people. I can update my Facebook, and I usually say the most random things on my Twitter it is surprising anybody is even following me (@gizmoalex by the way). So I love that my phone, which should be for calls, allows me to communicate in these different ways. When you add in e-mailing and text messaging the only thing you are really missing is smoke signals, and I am not sure but there may be an app for that.