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Today Google announced Android, their wildly anticipated mobile platform. Android is a free, open, and complete software platform for mobile devices like phones. It includes a Linux-based operating system, a user-interface, and applications.

Android will be developed by the Open Handset Alliance, which includes Google and more than 30 other heavyweights such as Sprint, T-Mobile, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. The first version of the Software Development Kit will be available for download next week on November 12. Handsets based on Android are expected to be available in the second half of 2008.

Android is getting lots of news coverage and discussion on blogs like TechCrunch and ZDNet. It will provide an open platform that’s very different from the walled gardens of today’s cell phone networks. Google Gadgets and OpenSocial applications could do great things on a phone. Android will fuel innovation in new services and applications; rather than the limited options that phone networks provide to a captive audience.

Android changes things; it may even do to Windows Mobile what Internet Explorer did to Netscape. In a year, when Android handsets are available, wireless broadband will be available from cell networks, Wi-Fi, WiMax, and perhaps a 700-MHz wholesale alliance in the U.S. In a few years, imagine an Android gadget with a phone, broadband, applications you love, GPS, and a wireless high-def TiVo. Now imagine that all that is cheap or even free, supported by new kinds of ads that are always perfectly targeted.

The impact of Android could be disruptive on the scale of a large meteor strike. There are large and inflexible dinosaurs that will not evolve quickly enough to survive. But many companies will thrive, and when the dust settles it’s consumers who are going to benefit the most.