I love Google. I use Google. And I would have said the exact same thing two years ago. At least Schmidt came out and eventually said what pretty much every comp

I love Google. I use Google. And I would have said the exact same thing two years ago. At least Schmidt came out and eventually said what pretty much every company that has shareholders stands for. Ergo, this is not a tired reference to anything, really. It just so happens that Google by their very nature already knows a lot more about me than my current provider (vzw) will ever know. And using a phone on their service will increase Google's knowledge that much more. I'm honestly not much a smart-phone person. I was an early adopter (Windows CE phones) and ever since then, it's given me a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Smart-phones have not changed much, really. At their core, most are not as good at being a phone as some of their less-snazzy counterparts. That was my original gripe. What has changed: ubiquity of mobile-friendly content and increased bandwidth to handsets. Now it doesn't matter much. Smart-phone users are more likely to use their devices for everything BUT talking on the phone. At any rate, I think the fact that android ties to a google account is a bit of a privacy fail, but IIRC Sidekick does the same thing, roughly (though not to Google). Then the fact that by default the calls will go through GVoice means that Google absolutely knows everyone you call, everyone that calls you, every SMS/MMS. The privacy implications of that are similar to Google setting up its own high-performance DNS (that's been hashed over in a few threads here on YC as well, poke around). Still, with all that... I'm kinda lusting for this gadget.