I'm in love with a robot...I mean...an Android.

Android phone, that is. I have an Android phone, and I love it. It's not the Motorola Droid that you've probably seen all the commercials for. It's the HTC Eris...Verizon's OTHER Android phone.

Is it the perfect phone? No. Is it better than the iPhone? Probably not. (However, Verizon's network service is better than AT&T's.) But it is a really cool phone. I won't bore you with all the geeky details of the techy stuff you can do with it (like analyze wireless networks) but I will share just one evening of life with my phone.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the youth service for my church. In the course of just a couple of hours one evening, I did the following (listed in order of occurrence, in case you were curious):

1) looked up something on the internet

2) used my phone as a guitar tuner

3) created an mp3 playlist for before the service

4) took some nice 5 megapixel pictures

5) emailed those pictures to someone

6) created a playlist for music after the service

Oh yeah...and I called someone, too. Pretty cool, huh?

Tonight my phone was laying on the table next to my recliner, and I saw that I had a notification that I had a new Facebook message. I could have logged onto my laptop, which was on a table on the other side of my recliner, but instead I just checked it on my phone.

It was from some friends who are babysitting for us tomorrow night. The message contained their address. My phone also has a trackball on it. Just to see what happened, I rolled the trackball and watched the cursor move down the screen. When it got the body of the message, what do you know? It highlighted the address. Just the address. It put a nice little selection border around the address. I clicked the trackball, and presto! It launched Google Maps and went straight to that address.

I have to admit I was impressed. I've had the phone for a few months, and I am still finding cool things it can do.

What will smart phones be like in 5 years?!?