I have seen the future and it is Android-shaped.

As much as I have lusted after an iPhone (my current plan would have been too expensive to dump) and longed to leave the clutches of T-Mobile (see my previous columns), having had the Android-based T-Mobile G1 in my sweaty hands for a couple of weeks has changed my mind about both staying with T-Mobile and wanting an iPhone.

Android, as you know, is an open source software platform for such devices as cell phones, and is the product of the Open Handset Alliance, along with huge initial input from Google.

To say that the project is ambitious is an understatement. As the announcement of the Android source code (October 21, 2008) proclaimed: "Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and . . . development tools." On the day following that announcement, the G1 became available.

There's no doubt that the G1 is well specified. It boasts quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, along with GPS, assisted GPS (cell tower triangulation), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, accelerometer and compass.

The G1 is as intuitive as the iPhone, but not quite as physically pleasing; in my opinion, however, it's a better product for four main reasons.

First, while the G1's core feature set is very similar to that of the iPhone -- the G1 has a terrific touch-sensitive HVGA LCD color display, good sound quality, and a terrific, well-organized and responsive user interface with sophisticated graphics -- it also has a swivel-away screen that reveals a keyboard (the display automatically changes from portrait to landscape mode) that makes responding to e-mail, texting, instant messaging and Web-browsing far more practical than on the iPhone.

Second -- and this is a biggie -- the G1 is open in a way that the iPhone definitely isn't. There is no "backdoor" allowing the remote removal of applications, as there is on the iPhone; and there's a whole slew of applications available for the G1 (most of them currently free) that don't have to be preapproved by T-Mobile.

Third, and this really matters to me, the G1's integration with Google search, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Calendar is beyond excellent.