Everyone Loves Android

Starting tomorrow, T-Mobile's Android smart phone will officially hit the streets. And developers around the world are designing applications to make it more interesting and exotic. We've already mentioned some of the new apps to hit the market; now come two more that fill some important niches.

The music Web site Imeem, which has a license to stream music from all the major music labels and a host of independents, has released Imeem Mobile for the Android phones. According to TechCrunch, the site allows you to play the music of your choice for free (after listening to an ad or two, of course), hear a selection of the most popular artists on Imeem at the moment, or pick a musician and let the Web site build a playlist around his or her style. You can't create your own playlist, alas, but you can create a station based on your favorite songs or musicians.

According to InformationWeek, two developers have rolled out the first app to allow Android phone users to start syncing the phone with their Microsoft Exchange Server. It's still pretty beta so far; all you can really do is download your Exchange contacts to the phone. The developers, Wrike and Intermedia, plan to sync Exchange's calendar function with the phone, but since users can already access their Exchange e-mail via IMAP, they won't bother with e-mail. Not as sexy as having the world's music on your phone, sure. But when Google didn't include this function in the phone at the rollout, most critics were pretty disappointed. This fills one of the biggest gaps in the original design.

Finally, Motorola has announced plans to roll out its own version of the Android phone by next summer. According to Business Week, the new handset will be among the first of the new "social smartphones," which are explicitly designed to connect and interact in Facebook and MySpace. People who get paid to gush over the Next Big Thing predict that the next social text craze among young adults will be mobile Facebook networking. Motorola, whose handset division has withered and whose stock is in serious trouble, hopes to revive its fortunes with Android.