Out of the box, iTunes seems pretty smart. It will sync photos using just the photos it finds in the "My Pictures." Nice. For Contacts and Calendar, it wants to use Outlook (if you have it installed). It will allow you to choose Gmail for contacts, but not for calendar.

Looking for a solution for the calendar, I came across just the thing. A free service that lets you use the OTA Exchange push syncing, but it links to your Gmail or Plaxo account. The company that is doing this is Nuevasync. The service got some good call-outs over at PainintheTech.

I've never been happier with a device than I have been my my iPhone. However, there is one huge problem. You can't write your own software for it (this doesn't count) , or even hack some existing software that someone else wrote. OK, at least you can't do those things without using a process called jailbreak, and then you can't even update your iPhone without worrying that you'll lose everything you've installed on your it. Recently Android was announced by Google as a device platform, not a device implementation. They got other people on board. But the killer piece is that you can go out right now and download a full SDK for OSX, Linux or Windows. It includes a full emulator to test your code and even a plugin for eclipse. And you can code in Java. Why did Apple skimp on the SDK for the iPhone? February is a long way away. There is probably a legion of people out coding for Android tonight that would have been working on iPhone apps had Apple released a SDK. Some are already wondering if the iPhone can be put to better use....

Can it crush the iPhone? Maybe. In 2008, when there are HTC devices running Android for $99 (or even free) at Sprint, who is going to pay $400 for an iPhone? When they build a dozen different form-factors of Android devices how can the iPhone compete? I suppose there will always be a market for iPhone as long as they function as video iPods, and as long as Apple keeps us locked into iTunes. But Android is using webkit! That's half the reason I bought the iPhone. Here is a deeper look at the Android stack. Plus you can win some of the $10 million they are giving away for cool applications written from now till March 2008.

After getting my iPhone, I thought I finally wouldn't need or want another device for long time. Too bad it only took two months for that sentiment to disappear.

A screen grab of the SDK running on my Mac....