Sorry but can someone just tell me what the heck is Android? I've never heard of it before.

The Gphone OS

its google's phone os. based on linux, but running a java variant on top iirc...

http://code.google.com/android/

Is Android far better than OS2008? What is the big deal?

It's barely functional at this point. That said it's exciting to see it's progression and development since it's got Google's backing and developers working on it. There should be working phones based on this platform by Q4 2008 if everything goes well.

It's hoped there will be gazillions of apps created for it; like the iPhone SDK launch, but there's even more crazily optimistic people hyping this.

Quite frankly, I'm much more interested in it as a compatibility layer for running Android apps, than as a replacement OS; I haven't tried it yet, so maybe it will be better, maybe worse.

The good thing is, right now it's runnable as a chroot environment. That's very good news if you just want it for running apps, just like the Debian chroot stuff some people here are playing with. But it seems you do need a custom kernel, anyway, which is not so hot.

It's gonna be interesting to see the marked difference between the application selection between iphone and android\nit.

The open platforms without DRM and commercial 'repository' (read:store) will have a majority of service-centric apps (google apps (maps, mail, cal, etc), voip clients (skype, jajah, etc)) where the producers will make money either from the traffic (for ad placement, data gathering, etc) or their services (eg:skype or jajah premium services). Of course the usual slew of open source apps will make their way here too albeit at a moderately slower pace. Commercial quality standalone games will probably make it last to this type of biz model if at all.

Nokia will bound to try to put in their iTunes store-like solution into the mix to try jumpstart the content before\with step-5.

There^ ya go...
My thoughts exactly.

It would go the other way too. Apps like Canola and Maemo Mapper could just as easily wind up on Android as well.

Also:

Check this >> What Android is and What Android isn't.

er... so anyone up to making it, uh ***** friendly?

Id be up for some, uh, testing if the install could be somewhat simplified, though I imagine that at some level, it cant be simplified (what with the low level hacking and all).