My favorite tech guy, Leo Laporte, had me on “This Week in Tech” yesterday, along with Ryan Block of Engadget, Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily (she just uploaded her first show, a test drive of the Tesla roadster, and it’s most excellent!), and Roger Chang of DL.TV. Lots of fun and we spent lots of time talking about Open Social, among other things.

The news business is totally commoditized. Don’t believe me? Look at TechMeme this morning. It’s all about Google’s Android mobile platform announcements. All the time. Whew.

Instead of trying to compete with the news crews who have written endlessly I just went to Peets, got myself an iced latte, and filed this report from my cell phone.

Oh, don’t expect to see much about this on my link blog, either. There’s too much discussion about it so far.

My two cents?

1. How come there’s no talk about building devices that integrate better into automobiles? I think Microsoft is WAY ahead here.
2. This is a platform, not a hardware device. Andy Rubin, on the call, said that we should expect 1,000 GPhones.
3. There wasn’t much specific about how this platform beats other operating systems like Symbian and Microsoft’s. Big selling point for Android? It’s open source. Will that lead to end user innovations? We’ll see. So far I haven’t heard anything that’ll make me sell my iPhone on eBay.
4. I like Google’s strategy of giving stuff away to developers. It’s the right strategy, but like with last week’s Open Social announcements by Google there are a LOT of unanswered questions. I guess we’ll see how good this OS is when the Android SDK comes out next week.
5. I hope we really see some innovative new devices like a great podcasting phone, or great integration into your car’s environment. But those kinds of fun things are going to be off in the future and Google seems to want to be a platform player, and seems to be avoiding going up the stack for now. We’ll see if that holds out over the next few years (I suspect it won’t).

Anyway, fun Monday morning.

[kyte.tv appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118/69129&embedId=10010781]