I still think Android, and its openness toward developers, can do some magical things and give iPhone a run for its money. But as we stated before, a lot needs to happen first—Android devices need to be a lot more numerous in consumers' hands, numerous enough for third-party developers (along with Google's first-party talent as well) to have a major incentive to drive the platform forward. It also has some major network power-management issues to overcome; the G1's battery never makes it through the day for me, and while that may just be because it's a shitty battery, Android's always-on approach to network access and background processes surely plays a part.

The Android Market is not yet the iPhone App Store, but here is a taste of what is, hopefully, a lot more to come.

Anycut: Anycut takes advantage of one of Android's fundamental strengths—the distillation of every possible event your phone can do—send a text message, go to a specific URL in a browser, etc—into a system-wide Intent, which any app can in turn access. Anycut allows you to take any intent and create a desktop shortcut for it—say, opening all of your Gmail messages labeled with a specific tag, or sending an SMS message to your most-texted contact.

Compare Everywhere: Like a hybrid of Japan's QR codes and Google SMS's UPC price check feature, Compare Everywhere reads barcodes (of just about everything, from a Criterion Blu-ray of The Man Who Fell to Earth I just watched to the stick of Right Guard sitting on my desk) and gives you a list of best prices—from online sources as well as physical brick-and-mortar shops near your GPS coordinates. The haptic buzz indicating a successful scan is unbelievably satisfying, and saves you money.

Shazam: Shazam's same great song identification skills—able to snatch notes from the barroom's speakers and pick the song in seconds—here on Android, co-existing with its identical iPhone version and similar ones for dumbphones. It's an amazing trick, regardless of the platform, and good to see one of the bigger hits on the iPhone quickly and smoothly ported over.

TuneWiki: Still jailbreak-only for the iPhone since apps can't access your iPod music, TuneWiki can show its full potential on Android, grabbing lyrics (that scroll karaoke style) and videos for all of your music as it plays.

Video Player: Video player plays H.264 MPEG4 clips, making up for a glaring hole left open in Android's first release: no video player. It gets the job done, and is a prime candidate for something to get sucked back up into the core Android distribution, as is an open source project's frequent wont.

Power Manager: Another necessity that's both a blessing and a curse, Power Manager lets you take limited control over the things that influence how long your battery will live—turning on/off all the radios, GPS, adjusting screen brightness, etc according to your current power level. It shouldn't be a necessary app for G1 owners, but it is; on the other hand, it shows how easy it is for a developer to fill a need and access hardware directly without having to ask permission. System-level functions like this, in large part, are not available to iPhone developers, and that's notable.

WikiTude: One of the apps we were most excited about at launch, WikiTude could still use some polishing, but it shows just how cool augmented reality apps can be. Overlaying link to geo-tagged Wikipedia articles on your camera's live view image utilizing the G1's built-in compass and accelerometer, it's an amazing thing to fire up on my roof in Brooklyn. Not so useful in the living room, but it's a great proof of William Gibson's classic notion—overlaying data from the web onto our live view of the world.

PhoneFusion Visual Voicemail: Solid visual voicemail support for Android. Another example of something other platform/carrier combos make you pay for (ahem, Verizon) or don't let you access at all.

Chomp SMS: Well, what do we have here. This looks familiar. Chomp is a replacement SMS app that mimics the iPhone's iChat-inspired text interface, and also happens to include a great soft keyboard looking exactly like the iPhone's, but adding haptic feedback—something coming to future Android distros. It also ties into Android's system-wide notification services, so if you want to drop the default SMS app altogether, you can.

Locale: In early versions, Locale was cool: it changed your ringtone or a few other phone settings based on your GPS location. Then, the features started coming, like the ability to send Tweets or use several other of Android's Intents, and it became clear exactly what Locale is—a framework (like Applescript, essentially) for triggering anything on your phone according to your location. When I'm at the office, set Facebook status to frowny face. When I get home and it's before 4PM, tweet "meet me at the bar" and start playing "O Happy Day."

Amid the iPhone 3G launch hysteria, we made a pronouncement that, looking back now long after the dust has settled, pretty well nailed it: forget hardware, it's code that counts. Code via the juggernaut that is the App Store, which allowed the iPhone to truly came into its own as a mobile platform.

Now, our first official look at T-Mobile's G1, the first Android-capable phone built by HTC, is less than 24 hours away, and the same adage holds true now more than ever. Android's openness puts the emphasis even more squarely on the code this platform will run, making the hardware almost an afterthought. And while it's still quite early in the game and things won't really kick up until the G1 becomes available sometime in October, the Android Market is already looking like an equally if not more vibrant place for great apps for your phone.

One of the main positive points in our Android preview guide was that Android will likely be home to the best direct tie-ins to Google's web apps like Maps, Docs, and Gmail, of any device around. And not only will they shine individually (remember's Apple's proud claims of the iPhone's custom Google Maps integration?), each Google service is set up as an open API within Android, meaning they're all available for mashing up with any other type of data imaginable in third party applications, effectively allowing developers to easily convert awesome Google service hybrids (like Beer Mapping, one of my favorites) into mobile apps.

Unsurprisingly, Maps integrations are the main focus being taken by the early wave of Android Apps, many of which were written in response to the Android Developer's challenge. Throw in location awareness via GPS or cell towers (another Android core service), and we've got ourselves the ingredients for some truly next-level stuff.

Enkin: When many people envisioned a location-aware future for mobile tech, they were probably dreaming up something like Enkin. If you can last through the somewhat brutal video here, you'll see some amazing potential: Enkin is basically a visualization framework for location information which can place locations on a two-dimensional map, a quasi-three-dimensional Google Earth type view, and coolest of all, overlay them onto the view streaming live out of your phone's camera. It uses GPS and accelerometers to sense exactly which direction the camera pointing, giving you an annotated view of the real world. You can add your own placemarkers or draw them in from the internet.

Locale: Borne from an MIT class specifically for writing Android apps (and winner of a $275,000 first prize from the Android dev challenge), Locale lets you define your most frequented places on a map and set your phone to respond to those places in a number of different ways. While the prototype is mostly focused on phone settings (like switching to silent when you're in the office or at a movie theater), these kinds of frameworks can be expanded infinitely. Home automation software could be programmed to turn on the lights (or start cooking your breakfast, Pee-Wee Herrman style) once you're a few blocks away from your home, for instance. It takes Bluetooth proximity to a whole new level, one that's not dependent on the limited proximity to another device but only your actual real-world location independent of any other variables.

GeoLife: In a similar vein is GeoLife, a location-aware to-do list. You can pair actions on your list to locations (or types of locations) to get a reminder to buy milk when you're near a grocery store.

Ecorio: Using GPS, Ecorio runs in the background (another edge Android has over the iPhone) and estimates the carbon output of your day's journeys. Once it learns your habits, it can then suggest public trans or carpooling alternatives. Another $275,000 first prize winner.

Cab4me: Takes your current location and feeds it into a database of nation-wide cab companies, allowing you to order a cab pickup instantly with your current locations. Google Maps overlays also show areas of cities where you're likely to hail a cab off the street.

BioWallet: Not all of the innovative apps are map based. BioWallet uses your phone's camera as an iris scanner to lock down sensitive information like account numbers and passwords on your phone, or even the phone itself. Handwriting-based IDs can also be implemented, all processed for an additional pass/fail reading—all processed on the phone itself which keeps biometric data secure.

CompareEverywhere and GoCart: Both capture photos of product UPC codes to then tie into online databases for comparison pricing, product availability, and shopping list compilation.

TuneWiki: Music apps are a bit thin pre-release, but TuneWiki (which is already out for jailbroken iPhones—not in the store yet, which won't be a problem with Android) looks impressive for grabbing lyrics and album art with your music. See it in action here.

Teradesk e-Storage: We love Air Share on the iPhone, and e-Storage looks to provide many similar services, with file versioning and Google Docs integration (one of the first of many G-Docs tie-ins, surely).

True, some of these apps could seemingly be just as at home in the iTunes App Store and on other platforms (many mobile OS's have some iteration of a barcode reader, for instance). But what has the potential to set Android apart though is its open source foundation; with the support of the open-source development community—one of the largest and most important driving forces of innovation in computers and software throughout history—Android could blast open mobile platforms even further than the iPhone has or could. Especially when you consider the core open-source projects that have shaped the internet since the beginning—Apache, MySQL, PHP, ssh, and countless others—making it onto phones in a core and unified way. Despite early SDK kinks, we could be seeing some exciting stuff in the next few months.

For a few of the other sides to the Android coin, be sure to check out our guide to five things both good and bad about Android. And if you've seen any other embryonic pre-release Android apps that look exciting, tell us in our new-and-improved threaded comments.