So I woke up with a ripper this morning, and I came downstairs to see that Symbian Guru has abandoned Symbian for Android. Because my head was throbbing, I lingered on this blog entry a bit longer than I normally would, and I realized it was because I had to say something besides “welcome to the platform*.”

I have watched with excitement as my friends and family one by one switch to Android. My brother got the EVO 4G yesterday, my Sister-in-law got the Backflip two weeks ago. My girlfriend, who is terrible at remembering names, has repeatedly brought up the HTC Aria, asking about it and recalling the advertisements shown during the early World Cup 2010 games.

This is not about building a community any more. With 160,000 Android devices being sold per day, this is about being at the right place at the right time.

Ricky says this in his Symbian-Guru farewell post:

While European carriers stumble over themselves to carry the latest Nokia devices, American carriers tend to pick up the lame-duck and low-end versions of Nokia’s phones. This is improving, but at a snail’s pace. Both Symbian and Nokia are dying brands in the U.S., if not already dead, and I’m sick and tired of banging the gong alone.

I spent much of my last month in Europe taking pictures of billboards, noting TV advertisements, and comparing displays in mobile phone shops, and I can say this: Nokia and Sony Ericsson still rule Europe. But HTC is making a huge push there. When I drove into Prague on the 611, I passed by the biggest HTC Android advert I had ever seen plastered on the side of a warehouse. It must have been a football field long.

Furthermore, because of Sony Ericsson and Samsung’s support of Android, the platform is gaining a lot of recognition over there. In the newsstands in Munich, publications like Mobile Zeit and Mobile News all had the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 prominently featured on the cover. It was in display windows all over the place, and there were advertisements for it on walls, on TV, and on the radio.

I keep telling Americans that Sony Ericsson is going to break Android through to the European market, but I don’t know if anyone believes me.

But back to the abandonment of Symbian. With the new top-of-the-line Nokia N8 rocking the first version of Symbian^3 on the way, you’d think that a Symbian enthusiast would be all over it. But Ricky totally nails it:

When the Nokia N8 was first announced, I was dead convinced I would purchase one out of my own pocket. I started putting money aside, ready to even pre-order the N8 as soon as I could. However, the more I use the Nokia N97 as my primary device, the less I’ve been convinced that the N8 is going to be better. Time and time again, Nokia’s high-end smartphones have arrived with pathetic processors, stingy amounts of RAM, and small batteries – why should I put up another $500 of my own money ‘just to see’?

When I reported about the N8 on Betanews, I talked to Nokia about the device’s 680Mhz processor, noting that their absolute top of the line device has a processor only as fast as the current generation of mid-range Android phones.

They said “there are optional ways to achieve great performance” outside of raw processing capabilities.

It kind of upset me that they’d put a freaking 12 megapixel camera into the device, but chose to rely on “options” to deliver a screaming user experience. It just reminded me of the people who put stripped-down Linux distributions on old machines and claim they run just as fast as newer, more powerful machines.

They may be efficient, but why should efficiency only be employed when it’s a necessity?

But I digress. This is not proclaiming the death of Symbian in any way or naming winners and losers in the mobile world. This is just another reminder that one by one, people important to other mobile platforms are becoming Androids.

Android is not perfect. But no technology is, and that’s part of why it’s such a wonderful and exciting field. You get familiar with the limitations of your hardware or software and delight in the workarounds you devise. You learn their strengths and exploit the hell out of them.

That’s what technology is all about, that’s what Android is all about for me.

*Welcome to the platform, by the way.

Right now there are only 15 apps up there, including free things like the Bank of America app, Myspace Mobile, and Flyscreen, and for-pay games like The Sims, Pac Man, and Call of Duty mobile.  Currently, only two apps are unique to Verizon, the free “My Verizon” app for account information, and the free Visual Voicemail app which requires a $2.99 monthly fee to use.  The latter of these comes pre-installed on the Droid and reportedly can’t be uninstalled….actually hang on, let me check and see if people aren’t just total morons….

Okay, they may be right.  When I looked through “manage applications,”  the only apps I can uninstall are the ones I installed myself.  This is, of course just a cursory judgement, and I’m sure some further probing will uncover a way to fix that, and I’ll post it when I do.  If not, that’s kind of stupid.

There really isn’t much else to say about the Verizon section of the Android Market, but there is one huge question:    If this is a V Cast-related market, are the for-pay apps billed to my account?

NOPE.

They’re Google Checkout just like everything else in the market.

Complete and total bust.

But that’s hopefully only for the time being.  Once the section provides apps unique to the Verizon network, or apps that are billable to your Verizon account, then it will be useful. For now though, it’s like a bar at 3:30 in the afternoon:  ghost town with potential.