It’s exciting, says Pogue.

David Pogue: Well, Android is Google’s cell phone operating system. They have some beautiful demonstration videos on their website. And it’s quite attractive and extremely easy to use, sort of iPhone-like in its way.

And the really exciting thing is that it is meant to be opened. It is meant to be added on to and you’re supposed to pick programs that you like and install them.

And the pro of this is it’ll make these phones much more useful and personalizable and interesting to the owners. The downside is they’re turning into PCs. They will have to be troubleshot and they’ll be much more complex and who are you going to call when something doesn’t work? Google?

The Android phones are direct competitors to the iPhone and so will Verizon’s new phone. They are saying that their phones will soon be open to third-party programs as well.

So it’s just a whole new world where the phone becomes much more than a phone and that’s really the ground that the iPhone broke.

Recorded on May 15, 2008