Personally, I don't care which company Google licenses its mapping data from, as long as it is accurate. 

-Eric Zeman, Information Week

When asked about implications of the Google deal with regards to Navigation on the iPhone...

We are making sure that navigation is an application that is allowed.  If there is any restriction on the platform, that indeed has to do with the restrictions that we have in our contracts. Navigation is allowed, provided that the right fees are paid

- Alain De Taeye, Founder, Tele Atlas

MIT's minds of tomorrow value Location in mobility contexts more than other features such as voice or messaging.  A professor there recently challenged his computer science students to develop applications using Google's Android SDK, and a majority of the entries focused on location-based scenarios. 

If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation. For these students at least, cell phones should be all about location, location, location. Most of the projects produced by the seven teams of students involved programs that let phones track people's physical place -- or that of their friends -- to help them do things and meet up.

Here's one example from project Loco 

On the topic of openness at the 2008 Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference...

All carriers have a lot of baggage.  We know we are hard to do business with. We can be caught up in our own bureaucracy with the size of our business.

We are working on a new approach for all our platforms so developers can have access to open software development kits and applications programming interfaces.  We are very excited about a set of open Android APIs and a variety of devices using them.  I hope it will generate development of not dozens but tens of thousands of new applications that will spawn a new level of excitement in this industry.

-Joe Sims, T-Mobile 

Google has really thought through what Apple has just begun to unlock.  Developers are now bringing up media applications on the systems and then will turn to work on location-based services and systems optimization for lowest power and maximum throughput.

-Sy Choudhury, QCT on the topic of Androids port to Qualcomm 3G solutions, which will initially include 5 new handset releases in the next 12 months   

-EE Times 

You just can't help but to be curious about Android.  It's not like a Linux-Java stack is revolutionary, but rather that the Android packaging and porting plan is by supporting the rapid introduction of thousands of mobile clones leading to the emergence of a device long tail, which could indeed lead to free phones someday.  That approach belittles big mobile OEM efforts big time by democratizing the tools of production and design now down to mobile manufacturing, and it arrives with impeccable timing when everyone is distracted by Apple and the head of the tail.  And with Google rounding up 1788 developers to write long tail apps for their Android Challenge, OEM Jedi's best watch your back.  A clone army is mobilizing.

There were four Android demos onsite in Barcelona this week. The three I saw at Marvell, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm booths weren’t enough to convince me that the industry is on the verge of a disruptive paradigm shift a la Android, but rather that single-chip promises powering Android will indeed introduce disruptive motions; of course though, what I saw of Android itself wasn’t much beyond what Google shared back in November.

Marvell, Qualcomm, and TI were all demonstrating identical Android capabilities, apparently at Google’s request for non-differentiation - according to Sy Choudhury, a sharp PM from Qualcomm.  These capabilities included Browsing, OpenGL, etc. And all demos combined single-chip features such as GPS, broadband connectivity, graphics acceleration, and multimedia capabilities to showcase Google applications. For me, the wow-factor was not a spinning globe care of the OpenGL demo that looked like Google Earth, but rather the packaging of the computing & communications resources and integration porting of the Android Linux stack to them. The implications suggest anyone can build an Android phone or device by simply dropping the packaged silicon solution into a casing which any one of 1800+ ODMs in Asia can do these days. …Layer on a full stack open source operating system plus APIs and extensions, and the possibilities then become quite clear. It’s difficult to see how this approach (not necessarily Andriod itself) won’t change everything and turn the mobile world upside down for those selling mobile OS platforms or designing mobile devices… I hope Google can handle the porting demand though. They could get very busy, very soon. 

Yes, it's another end-to-end claim from SiRF, this time riding on the Android hype dropped weeks ago.  I thought SiRF's previous end-to-end announcement at their inaugural ecosystem event last Oct was strange, arriving like a hangover after the middleware party tried to rock the house years ago.  I mean, if you're a developer, what do you gain by using a proxy of other proxies to get a map on your SiRF-powered device, other than increased latency?  Why not just use an OpenLS API, web service, or any other XML or javascript derivative directly...  Is it better from a silicon company? 

The same goes for OMA-SUPL with this latest E2E PR.  What does SUPL have to do with Android, other than perhaps HTC or some other OHA member may ship SUPL-ready handsets with SiRF chips in them?  It has nothing to do with Google, that's for sure - they are embracing an Open Source approach to mobility - the antithesis of tired telecom standards coming out of the OMA.  Water and oil don't mix guys...