So Google has been talking a lot how open Android is, but unfortunately, if you are using to using a laptop or PC, then there are still quite a few restrictions in place. They still haven’t come clean about its statements like “Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”. The have taken big steps in the right direction, but we need to keep the pressure on to make sure that they keep going in that direction.

So far, there is no SIP/VoIP stack included, you can get that with a Nokia N80i and some other Symbian devices for a long time now. As least Android is open enough that it seems that you can do add a SIP stack yourself, if you want. Some are saying that T-Mobile is expressly blocking VoIP.

It does look like Google has started to release the source for Android, which is great news but I haven’t heard yet whether or not they have really released everything. I am guessing they’ll probably do something vaguely like Apple Mac OS X, where the sources for the foundations are released, but as you go up thru the libraries and to the applications, less and less of the sources are released. It looks like Google has released the sources to the core apps, so they are already doing a lot better than Apple.

For more on the topic of the openness of Android, check out Android; The not-so-open open platform, it’s a well annotated discussion. The author discusses the trick of code signing, so that Google/T-Mobile can still control which code can run while releasing all of the source code.