Two words: Office compatibility. ARE YOU LISTENING NOKIA?

Why do Maemo & Android have to be mutually exclusive? It's been reported that Nokia already has a dialog with Google and I can only assume they would be looking to add compatibility rather then "scrap" a tablet OS that A) is shipping B) works C) is part of their long term goals for NITs.

Personally my bet is they will look into integrating Android application compatibility as much as possible.

No doubt Google has the advantage of being able to gather massive developer support quickly, but at this point it's still just a "plan" rather then a massive software archive to drool over.

With OS2008 there are some real advantages coming to Maemo as well. By bringing GTK up to date there is a huge base of existing software that can be ported much easier, and more linux desktop developers may be attracted.

I agree about graphic acceleration though. That is my biggest complaint about the n800. Coming from an Axim X50v (with horrible WM), it's the only thing I miss.

Yes, it really was amazing how well the Axim did graphic acceleration. The software the n800 has is just so much better, though, at least for my needs.

Maemo and Android seem to be very different... even if they both use linux as a kernel, Maemo is a real X11 server, so it can run all sorts of (desktop) programs if they're compiled. All the Android apps have to be written from scratch, don't they?

Anyway, I keep hearing Nokia has no interest in Maemo on a phone, so... hopefully they'll work well together?

weren't Nokia noticeably absent from any Android related anouncements? I can only assume it's because Nokia have a split personality - anything with a phone has to have a symbian-based OS, and only their "skunkworks" project of an internet tablet runs Linux and seemingly deliberately kept as a none-phone device.

it seems that linux really needs to coalesce around a smaller number of GUIs - what with Qt/Qtopia (& Opie), GPE, Android, Hildon/Maemo, and others I can't think of right now - and a relatively small number of developers, the skills required to build really good applications are being spread too thinly.

Once you add in the number of variants of linux distros for handhelds and PDAs, it gets way too complicated - there's various Nokia tablet specific ones as well as Angstrom...

arrggh! head explodes from trying to figure out all the compatibility issues!

Google is actually giving away $10 million in prizes on its Android Developer Challenge.
http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

They will choose 50 developers and a developer can get up to $300,000 ($25,000 preliminary prize an up to $275,000 final prize).

The contest should speed up development -- wow.

What does the Android tool (language?) for UI look like?

Does anyone have the SDK?

It's all available online. Eclipse is the primary tool and I think the language is in java.

Nice emulator!

It is! It's open source, too.

Anyone up for hildonizing he emulator?

That's correct Reggie. Java is the language for third party apps. Interesting choice, which could be a blessing and curse at the same time. It will mean that the hardware coming out needs to be fast, but there should be a bucketload of ready-to-go developers. The other smart thing google did was provide the SDK for all three major platforms (Windows, Intel Mac, and Linux). Not everyone wants to install linux just to develop