So maybe now Mr Balmer is reconsidering his comments of last week..
For me and my interest in geographic information the key detail about the Android SDK is the LBS component, and where is appears in the whole android stack. I have often argued that LBS would only really make sense as an underlining infrastructure that is available to all applications, therefore allowing much higher levels of integration.
One of the key factors to the success of the iPhone is the great integration between its applications, it’s just a shame these are currently restricted in number, to the Apple supplied applications.
With Android the Location Manager component is part of the core application framework, meaning that all user applications have access to the devices location. At a simple level this means that applications like the address book as access to the device location, so your contacts rather than sorted alphabetically could be sorted based on distance from your locations.
Or slightly more “left field” how about a security application which locks the device waiting on the user to enter a PIN if the devices location does not match the scheduled location from the calendar application.
For really the first time, the innovation which always comes from Open Source development can be focused on building LBS.. at last !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.