I'm concerned that the Android platform will lack the visual appeal of the iPhone and will tend towards the techie crowd more than the mainstream consumer. BUT..apps are king and Apple's missing the boat on a crucial mobile function that Google has totally nailed so far.

Yes...at least for the moment, Android has something that the iPhone SDK completely lacks and so far Apple seems uninterested in pursuing: MapView.

The iPhone SDK lacks the basic mapping API required by application developers hoping to tie the mobile experience to a geo-specific location. The only mapping function provided by the iPhone SDK is to send a URL to the iPhone's built-in Google map application and to let Google handle the rest.

I learned this while researching the iPhone SDK in comparison to the Android OS. I wanted to determine how difficult it would be to port Pocket Journey to the iPhone. As it turns out, the port could never happen as it couldn't for the majority of the apps submitted to the Android Challenge.

If you want, you can read more about this discovery here: blog.pocketjourney.com.