Google has announced the winners of its Android Developer Competition 2. Check out the winning apps. For the Android developers reading this post, start planning your next Android apps!

Windows Mobile used to be one of the most important mobile platforms. But that was long before Apple transformed the mobile scene. Windows Mobile still has many apps, mainly because developers have been writting for it for years and years. But mobile developers are aware that it has been ages since the software was updated, and it seems to be delayed more and more, much like Vista.

One more sign that Windows Mobile might be losing its mojo is a release from Handango that Blackberries are now the most popular device downloading apps from their store. Handango is one of the oldest and largest multiplatform app distributors. Since they have such a wide selection of softtware across so many platforms, they are able to a close eye on what the average mobile users consider their favorite devices. With this latest news suggesting that Microsoft might have a bigger battle on their hands then they originally planned, it brigns up some interesting questions:

• Will Microsoft throw more money and engineers at their old Windows Mobile platform to get the upgraded version out sooner?
• Can Microsoft compete with their legacy software against the newest OS specifically built for high-bandwidth, computationally expensive software like Apple iPhone?
• How much of their OS with they open to developers to compete with completely open source platforms like Google’s Android?
• How will Microsoft compete against mobile OS that are free for phone manufacturers like Android, and where will they make back their money? After all, Google plans to make their cash on mobile ads. What is Microsoft’s vision?

Google held the GTUG Campout, its first hackathon that focused on Google Wave. The programming teams were not restricted to Wave but also included several entries using Google’s Android OS.

Geogad was there and took part in a Wave project called “Trippy”, which is a Google Wave robot to help groups collaborate on trip planning. You can add it to any Google Wave by accessing trip-bot@appspot.com.

The weekend was a great way to get an intro to Google Wave and what it can do now and in the future. The overall impression from working on the Trippy robot is that Google Wave is rightly a developer only version for now. It is still missing several important pieces. Some of the biggest missing pieces are

1. Since there is no leader in a Wave, all participants are equal. This can be both good and bad.

2. No one has the ability to remove a participant after they have been added. This includes robot participants.

3. Wave cannot connect to external devices.

4. Wave gadgets and robots must reside on Google AppEngine, and the AppEngine still has some shortcomings. For example, in the Trippy robot, we planned and coded a version that accessed flight and hotel info from Kayak.com’s API. It worked locally but did not work on the AppEngine server because it had issues with accessing cookies properly. The Kayak API depends on cookies. As a result, the version of Trippy that was presented lacked this important feature.

The overall view of Google Wave is that there is a great deal of power under the hood, but it will need to be refined to make an impact with regular users.

The people who owned Google Phones and a few that did not but were planning to buy one thought that there was one killer app that made the purchase of an additional phone not only compelling but also a way to save money. This killer app is Compare Everywhere. It lets you take a photo of a bar code on an item that you want to buy. It then checks the bar code in its database against your location. It returns a list of prices of the same item in nearby shops. Basically, it is every bargain shopper’s dream and every retailers worst nightmare.

If this app catches on, I would not be surprised to see some stores investigate if it would be possible to block certain Internet signals. If they thought that competing online against Amazon was hard, wait until all their competition is digitally laid out at their customers’ feet while in the store.

Last night, I attended my first Google Android Developer Meetup. The month before, I attended my first iPhone Developer Meetup. With this tiny sample, I am more than qualified to start issuing unproven generalities.

The iPhone meetups have been going on for several months and have a large number of developers. The Android meetup is only two months old and had about 2 dozen developers. The iPhone crowd was mainly people looking to make money on the iPhone, either for themselves or for their company. The Android meetup was primarily attended by people programming Android as a hobby and out of curiosity. But the biggest difference of all: just about everyone at the iPhone meetup owned an iPhone or iTouch while only three people at the Android meetup owned a Google phone.

One of the more interesting statements for why the developers had not bought a Google phone yet was that the Android programming test tools included an excellent simulator while the iPhone simulator almost required a developer to buy a real iPhone to test their applications. But the other reason that the Google phones were not purchased yet is that developers have already bought the iPhone, in addition to the phone that they already owned, and just did not see any big reason to buy another phone.