This Tuesday I followed Google’s invitation to ICC Munich to their product marketing event err developer days.

After a much entertaining Keynote by Chris DiBona (open source programs manager at Google) I was able to choose from six concurrent sessions. I decided to attend the Android related talks to see how serious Google is on creating an free and open platform for cellphones. After half an hour marketing bullshit bingo there was an Q&A session. Interestingly every second question started with “Apple’s IPhone has …. How can I achieve this with Android?” There have been some critical questions which have been answered with “This is a quite good question. Bla, bla, bla.” and my question concerning a Roadmap till 2010 and when the full source code will be released was just answered with “soon”.

After this unfruitful first presentation I had to readjust my expectations and as expected most of the talks only scratched the surface and rarely showed interesting code. Fortunately Google cared really good for their guests, besides refreshments, lunch and many snacks the event specialists created a geek-friendly environment in the foyer of the ICC. I spent much time there talking to friends and Google engineers.

To my complete satisfaction the Advanced Gears session by Dion Almaer has been exactly the presentation I was expecting from the whole event: for each component of the Gears framework  the presenter gave a short introduction, presented use-cases and some good readable, sometimes advanced code examples along with quite impressive demonstration videos. Thank you Dion, I really enjoyed your talk.

Not totally surprising there was a live stream from the joint T-Mobile, Google press conference announcing G1, world’s first public available cellphone running Android. Whilst I did not watch the media event, I took a first row seat in the final wrap-up session. Again Chris did a quite good job. Android’s astonishing features were present very funny and also competently.(Unfortunately this part of the presentation has been tagged as a private video an YouTube.) Later on I was able to play a little bit around with the device. In my opinion it looks more like a developer prototype than a market ready product. The keyboard feels much better than others of this size but my concluding result is that I will have to wait for the next generation of Android devices to fulfill my requirements for a up-to-date cellphone.

Aside from the fact that I luckily was able to fiddle around with the device, there are now more open questions than before. My biggest concern is how open this platform really will be. Hopefully Google fulfills its promises accompanied by frequent releases of the Android SDK including the whole source code of the Android platform under a really free license.