The last couple of weeks have been interesting in the world of smart phones.  Motorola/T-Mobile, HTC/Sprint, and LG have all announced the upcoming release of new Android smart phones.  If you don’t know much about Android, that’s not surprising. It is a smart phone operating system announced with a lot of fanfare quite a while back. It is backed by Google, and supported by several large wireless industry players.  The idea is to provide a platform that will run on a lot of different phones, from different manufacturers, and different carriers, making it easier for developers to write software that will support a wide variety of users.

The problem to date has been that you could get any Android phone you wanted as long as it was the G1 from T-Mobile. Yep that’s right.  For all the hoopla, there has been only one Android phone on the market since Android was introduced.  Even with that huge limitation, the Android Market (their version of an App Store) now has about 10,000 applications on it.  The availability of more phones should provide additional momentum to encourage more developers to jump on the Android bandwagon.

The market trends with mobile applications are truly staggering.  Consider for a moment that just a little over one year ago there was not a single app store out there.  Sure, there were some smart phone catalogs, but they were mainly used by techies, and there was no way an average person could easily get access to software for their phone.  Enter Apple, and the App Store.  Since its introduction last summer there has been a proliferation of applications for smart devices. In addition to the 70,000+ for iPhones, and the 10,000+ for Android, there are a projected 20,000+ for Windows Mobile, a few thousand on BlackBerry App World, and a rapidly growing number of applications for the new Palm Pre and Pixi.

What does this all mean for us users?  It means that we are being presented with a rapidly growing number of software choices for our phones.  And more choices means more functionality.  More functionality means more usefulness.  More usefulness means more use.  The way we use our smart phones is growing rapidly, as is the amount of time we spend on them.  They are becoming our main vehicle of communications and “computing” at a rate that makes the evolution of PC and software look like it occured over eons.

We are rapidly being presented with many choices of software which make our phones more useful devices.  And that’s a good thing not only for consumers, but also for businesses.