The other shoe finally dropped this afternoon: after months of rumor and secrecy, the good folks over at Google announced that they and a consortium of handset makers and tech companies (Apple is conspicuously absent) are releasing a new mobile handset OS called “Android.” The new mobile OS, which you’ve probably been hearing about as the “Gphone” for the past couple of months (unless you’ve been living under a stone), is Linux- and Java-based, and will feature an open SDK that’s set to be premiered on November 12… Hey, that’s next week!

One of the key features of the OS will be its agnostic treatment of core and 3rd-party apps: for Android, all apps are equal. What does that mean for the educational community? One clear implication is that the iPhone will see competition both in its deployment as an academic tool and in the development of learning- and university-based applications. And frankly, competition is almost never a bad idea when it comes to finding the best solutions.

Of course, the release of Android doesn’t quite tell the whole story… While the SDK will be available shortly, handsets based on the new OS aren’t planned for release until early 2008 — right around the time that Apple’s SDK is supposed to make its entrance. So your current choices are an SDK without a phone or a phone without an SDK. Hmmmm… We think, by the way, that the real loser here won’t be the iPhone, but Windows Mobile (which is looking increasingly like a, well, you know…) — though only time will tell.

Either way, it’s time to get serious about the ways that ubiquitous converged mobile media devices are going to transform our classrooms. And that’s something that looks to be not years off, but maybe just a few months. So friends, it’s time to put on those thinking caps and get busy! Yowzah!