Ah, what a fun day so far! My folks decided to kick in with an early Christmas gift this year in sending me the cash to order myself a shiny new T-Mobile G1, a smartphone that runs on Google’s new Android operating system. I placed that order yesterday, and though I won’t receive it until November 10, 2008 (d’oh!), it’s at least paid for. My T-Mobile Dash, acquired early last year, will still be put to good use; since they were kind enough to unlock it for me (for free) last year and I’ve since flashed a newer (WM6.1) ROM onto it which continues to work, I’m just going to reset it (erase its brain) and give it to my buddy Shannon to use with her pre-paid cell phone plan. Its internet-based features won’t work (pre-paid plans don’t include internet connectivity), but it will still function as a standalone PDA-style device and it’s still a hell of a phone.

In other news (more interesting to the rest of you), Google open-sourced all of Android OS today. Seriously. Want to download the source code for the base firmware that will be running the first generation of Android phones? You can. Go click that link, and you’ll be downloading the source code yourself in short order. Dig through it a bit and you’ll be able to understand yourself why something behaves the way it does.

This is fan-freaking-tastic.

I’m already eager to get started brewing up apps for this thing on my own, but the community is busy churning out some seriously amazing stuff right now (like a shopping list manager that can scan barcodes with the phone’s built-in camera and comparison-shop online instantly on anything you scan, that can also automatically pop itself up with the right shopping list once the GPS sensor detects you’ve just walked into that store).

With this release, it won’t be long before we start seeing some truly astounding understanding of the platform and some amazing applications emerging for it.

Rock on, Google! This is a very cool move.

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