James Pearce was at MoMoBoston and let us know his thoughts about the Android presentation that was delivered there, including:

I remain enthusiastic overall. If Android becomes a dominant platform, then a lot of developer’s problems go away. That may happen. But of course it will only do so over many, many dead bodies - including those of plenty of companies of some significance. So success will be hard and bloody.

But even if Android does not become dominant, it will have shown that there is another way of looking at handset development. As Tom Hume says, it is, at the least, shaking things up a little. What other handset platform has ever exposed a developer’s API a year before any handsets are even likely to reach the shops?

Received and traditional telecoms wisdom is to build handsets for consumers first, operators a close second, and developers a distant third.

What Google seems to be trying to do (with no insignificant bribery too) is to see what happens when you reverse that order - or at the very least make developers feel like first-class citizens in the ecosystem. Build up a head-of-steam with third-party apps before the handsets ever emerge, and as such, an admirable experiment.

But will that be enough to make their force truly unstoppable when it meets the immovable object of today’s ecosystem? I’m certainly looking forward to finding out.

Dave Burke, a mobile engineering manager at Google, gave a talk at the Future of Mobile conference today.

Mike Butcher blogged the talk live on TechCrunch UK:

Burke did a fairly impressive demonstration of coding an application (in this case a mobile browser) inside 8mins (or 7mins 58 seconds to be exact - he timed it on stage).

Burke did say: “We’re really serious. We want to see serious innovation. We want operators and application developers to spend less time on little silos and more time building great stuff.” At the end he added an advert: “we’re hiring in Europe”.

During Q&A he said he hadn’t “heard” if Android will support Flash Lite, but he did say the Webkit would support Netscape style plugins.

How come Google is only releasing the full source code when the handsets hit the market next year? He said Google wanted to wait until it really worked on handsets before releasing the code.

What about the difference with the OpenMoko project, an open source mobile platform? “The difference with Moko is this [Android] is real,” he said “We have a lot of momentum with key partners. We are not talking about specifications, we’re just building it and trying to get support.”

And caught a little in video: