I think Android will give Apple competition in the short term, but is destined to fail in the long term.
Here are some technical reason to explain my stance. The concept of an open source phone OS is great and all, but pulling it off is actually very difficult. Here are some "complications" to the platform.
1) Android devices don't all use the same screen size or resolution. Do you know what a pain this is for developers? Yes, the iPhone OS now supports 2 different resolutions, but compare that to 20 different resolutions currently used on Android devices, a virtually unlimited number of resolutions in the future.
2) Android phones don't all use the same version of the OS. All the different phones out there were built with a specific Android version in mind.
3) The Android phone manufacturer adds their own software layer on top of the Android OS. This software layer allows the manufacturer to customize the phone a little bit, but ultimately cripples the phone. Many Android apps are not compatible with many of these different software layers. Google Earth doesn't even work on all the Android phones because of this problem, and it was WRITTEN BY GOOGLE. This software layer also limits the versions of the OS that will work on the phone.
Basically, Android apps have many unnecessary complications to worry about. That's one reason there are only 30,000 Android apps, versus the 140,000 iPhone apps.
There are other reasons Android can't compete over the long haul, but I'm out of time!
