The winning applications are a pretty balanced mix of productivity and entertainment applications. cab4me for example, one of the US$ 275000 winners, developed an application that will get a taxi to wherever you are at the press of a button. You don’t even need to know your address. Two applications, CompareEverywhere and GoCart use the phone’s builtin camera to scan barcodes and get additional pricing and/or review information online, a nice way of combining shopping at a store with the convenience of being able to compare prices and read reviews.

Have a look at the entire application gallery here. Many of the apps, if they don’t show up preinstalled on the first Android phones, will be available through the Android Market mobile store, which was also announced yesterday.

Alright, I’m still not quite up to the task of reporting things as they happen. Why is there always important news as soon as I go away for a few days…?

Anyway, the big news last week was of course the release of a new Android SDK version. It’s not quite a 1.0 release yet, but 0.9 should come close enough. Techcrunch has a few screenshots and details about what’s included and what isn’t. The new SDK is of course what the finalists of the Android Developer Challenge have been working with for months now. All other developers (the ones that didn’t abandon the platform for greener pastures) were stuck with an old preview that was last updated in February, so they should be quite relieved that finally they are getting something more current to work with.

HTC has gotten FTC approval for the Dream handset, which means that the rumors about T-Mobile launching that device pretty soon might actually be true. Of course the approval is for the hardware, it doesn’t mean that the software is finished. But it’s a step in the right direction. The rumor-mill continues to buzz (or whatever else a rumor-mill does) with variations of the actual release date and so far the only thing that seems to be set in stone is that it’s going to be a Q4 release, probably in October or possibly November.

The Android team have created a security FAQ and issued a challenge to security researchers to help harden the platform. That sounds like a good move, considering that various vulnerabilities were discovered in earlier versions of the SDK. And the very nature of these more and more powerful and connected devices demands greater attention to security details.

And now TmoNews report that it may even be a bit early. Well, not exactly, but they claim that pre-ordering will start on September 17th for existing T-Mobile customers. This makes a lot of sense, considering that T-Mobile were previously reported to be offering an Android phone for their 3G launch in October.

Anyway, I guess we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to find out what’s really happening. Maybe we will see this device sooner than many of us thought – until then, it will remain a dream. Let’s hope it turns into a HTC Dream soon.

There will probably be few updates to this site for the next 10 days, since I’m taking a short break and going on holiday. I’ll have my laptop with me, so if anything exciting happens, I’ll probably post, but if it’s something that can wait a few days, it will.

The register has an article on unhappy Android developers threatening to abandon development for the Android platform if Google doesn’t at least explain why there have been no updates of the Android SDK since February. They are especially upset because they know there is a newer version of the SDK, but Google isn’t sharing it with everyone. So far only the finalists of the “Android Developer Competition” have had access to it so far and they had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

It’s a rather weird situation – on the one hand, there’s a good number of developers who are really enthusiastic about developing for what The Register calls “the most closed open platform to not yet exist”, but they can only test their applications in an emulator and what they have worked on so far may need major modifications once a new version of the SDK is released. Google needs to get their act together quickly – this is mainly a communications issue. Google needs these developers, so the least they can do is to keep them happy by communicating clearly why newer SDK versions are not available, give them a timeline they can work with, let them know at least what changes they can expect from newer SDK versions.

If this situation isn’t resolved quickly, the Android platform may lose a number of key application developers before it even launches. The iPhone may be a lot more restrictive and closed – but it’s available now, sales are looking good and Apple is a lot more helpful than Google is proving to be at the moment.

Techcrunch are running an article today stating that the Gphone may really happen. Basically what they are saying is that the speculation about a phone from Google, which pretty much died down since they announced the Android platform, may gave been right after all. They have even managed to track down the design company that is supposed to be designing it.

Techcrunch usually have very reliable sources, so if they quote someone off the record as saying this company is doing the Gphone design, I take that as a credible statement. Of course it may never make it to the market, but the idea is certainly exciting…

Commenters in various blogs that report on the 3G launch seem to be confirming the launch date, but so far I have not seen confirmation of the Android rumours anywhere. The device is supposed to most likely be a HTC Dream. Of course, October 1st is in Q4 (just), so even with a Q4 delay of the first Android devices, this could well be true.

Then came Bluetooth and with it came the first round of security problems. Now why anyone would keep Bluetooth switched on all the time is a bit of a mystery to me anyway (considering the amount of battery drain), but people did come up with sophisticated solutions that would allow reading or changing someone’s address book or even making calls through someone’s phone from quite a few meters distance. Still, it was something that was quite easily mitigated by either switching Bluetooth off (if not needed) or at least making sure it didn’t accept just any connection.

Today all this has changed dramatically. Phones are no longer just phones, they are little computers with most of the capabilities of modern desktop computers and they even have at least equally good connectivity. The problem is that with those capabilities come certain risks – and it seems like parts of the industry are not sufficiently aware of them, and much less the users. It’s either that or they don’t care. Apple for example has come under a bit of fire recently when it failed to provide security updates to the Safari browser for the iPhone.

And Android devices will probably be even more at risk. There is no bug free software. Apple runs a tight ship when it comes to what can be installed on their iPhone. But even they can’t check for every possible problem. While it’s still unclear how software distribution will work for Android devices, what’s clear is that they will be a lot more permissive about what can run on them. That’s a good thing for the consumer, but it also means higher risk.

So what needs to be done to make sure that risk doesn’t turn into a major mobile disaster? First of all, both device vendors and users need to be aware of the risks. Millions of botnet-infected Windows PCs show that leaving security to the user is a flawed concept. The Operating System must be prepared to detect and prevent any unusual behavior (try sending 100 emails a minute from a touchscreen display and you’ll know what I mean). Vendors must be willing to provide easy ways of updating all the software installed on the device. In fact, on install the software should already tell the device how updates can be found and the device should refuse the installation of software that doesn’t provide a (working) update mechanism. And once security flaws have been found, there must not be a four month delay before updates are made available. I’d rather my phone disabled a certain application until a fix is available than run into a security problem that costs me a lot of money, time, reputation, …

Without a higher level of security-consciousness, I’m afraid we won’t have to wait much longer for the first mobile botnets. Those will be even harder to track down than the current ones. They may well cost users a lot more money. They will annoy us with text message spam. They will make us want to go back to the 1990s, when a mobile phone was big and heavy and couldn’t do much, but at least it did get the job done without placing us at risk.