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Android fans will soon have plenty of handsets to choose from, as Google expects there to be at least 18 Android-powered smartphones by the end of the year. More Internet InsightsWhite PapersCurtailing Online Distribution of Counterfeit and Gray Market GoodsSecuring Code Transfer with Signing: A Technical OverviewVideos



Mashery provides scalable on-demand infrastructure for managing your APIs. 

At the Google I/O conference, Andy Rubin, senior director for mobile platforms for Google, said that number could creep up to 20 handsets. Rubin said these devices will be made by eight or nine different manufacturers, although he did not name the companies. 

HTC has the only commercially available Android handset with the T-Mobile G1, but Samsung has shown off an Android smartphone that’s expected to be released in June. Companies like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Asus-Garmin also are expected to release smartphones with the Linux-based operating system. 

Rubin said because Android is an open source OS, these handsets would come with a variety of user interfaces and features, and Android will be offered to manufacturers in three options. The first is an obligation-free one where the cell phone maker downloads Android and loads it onto the handset. Companies that go this route cannot preload popular Google applications like Gmail or Google Calendar, though.

Just introduced a few hours ago by Steve Jobs at MacWorld.

Talk about thin — 0.76 inches at it’s widest. For those of you from Rio Lindo, that’s just a hair more than 3/4ths of an inch thick.

Features include a full-sized keyboard and a 13.3” LED- backlit screen. The keyboard has an ambient light sensor (something I desperately wish my laptop had) and a multi-touch trackpad. The multi-touch trackpad has a cool feature — you can select a picture, move your index finger and thumb (or your feet if you’re a Chimpanzee-American) to rotate it. You can also use the trackpad to pinch a picture smaller or to expand it.

Unfortunately, there is no CD or DVD drive but the system does come with a cable to let you use an optical drive from another computer, either PC or Mac.

The system should be available in a couple of weeks. The standard configuration is a 1.6 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM (very nice), and an 80 GB hard drive. The price? A mere $1,799. Expect the price to come down and the standard features to get better over time.

I’ve got Mac envy big time.

Oh, yeah — Greenpeace likes it, too.

For more information, check out Macworld.