If you don't know what phone to buy, then Google has already won.

One thing that this whole CES hoopla over Android has done is effectively make the entire SmartPhone space a wash. My friends who are now free agents (i.e. they bought the first iPhone, but their two-year contracts are up), have no idea what phone to buy. When they ask me, I don't have a definitive answer. This is a stark contrast to the past two years when the mantra was always, "Wish I had an iPhone."

My personal interest in SmartPhones is nebulous now. I have a Motorola Droid, and I don't really think twice about it. As that perennial sourpuss John C. Dvorak once said a couple years ago about the iPhone hype: "it's just a phone." The hype is finally dying, and my fad-wave is nearly over, as I have hardly any new friends getting SmartPhones for the first time.

God, that dreaded word "SmartPhone" is back in my lexicon. I worked in mobile in the late 90s, and the SmartPhone was always associated with the unimaginative attempts of telecoms to sell J2ME and whatever crap mobile experience as "the next big thing." I was embarrassed to call myself a "mobile developer" back then, especially after the dot-coms already crashed.

There was a brief period, though, when the iPhone came out, when I was mighty proud to call myself an iPhone developer. Unfortunately, now that I also do Android, I have to resort to "SmartPhone developer" as an alternative to the clunky "iPhone-slash-Android developer."

Which is all to say kudos to Google. They finally burst the iPhone's bubble. Even though the iPhone is still the phone to beat, I'd venture that consumers are equally curious about "dem Google phones" as they are about the iPhone.