Shortly after the keynote, there was a press conference and we were allowed to ask questions to the Wave team, Vic Gundotra, and Sergey Brin.  Since I’m an Android fanatic, I had to ask about the possibility of seeing an official native app for Android or iPhone.  To summarize their response, “No”.

Google touted that Wave was developed entirely with the Google Web Toolkit and fully utilized HTML5.  They envision the web as the platform of the future and the browser is becoming more like the operating system.  By creating web only apps, they can bypass all the time it takes to write native code for Android and iPhone.  This also means that all their new web apps will be readily available on Palm’s WebOS.

Another advantage of focusing on mobile browser apps is choice for the end user.  Several carriers have expressed interest in releasing Android phones that are free of Google.  If all the apps are available on the web, the user can still access their favorite Google services directly from the browser.  Carriers could always block the Google domains, but I doubt users will stand for walled gardens anymore.

So what does this mean for Android users? Will we see Google release any new native apps for Android?  I have been eagerly waiting to see native apps for Adsense, Analytics, Reader, and more.  After this week, it looks like I may be waiting a long time.  Instead of spending time on native apps for Android, Google will create mobile browser apps that work across multiple platforms.

We have already witnessed this strategy with the recent updates to mobile Gmail.  New features were first released on the mobile site, then weeks later the native app got an update.  However, the mobile browser version still offers functionality not available in the Android client.  Today’s unveiling of Wave just continues the same pattern.

So is all hope lost for native Google apps on Android?  The answer to that question lies with the community.  Either we whine to Google or we create the native apps on our own.  A quick search of the Market and you will find people doing just that.  Developers have already created Android versions of Adsense and Analytics.

Check out the official video of the Wave keynote and let us know what you think.

Will we ever see apps installed to the SD card officially supported?

There are no plans to support this feature in the next major release(codenamed Donut), but the team recognizes the demand for this.  There are still several technical hurdles to overcome before this is a reality.  It sounds like they are not sure which road they will take.

Currently, users have been partitioning their SD cards to create a seperate linux partition.  They talked about the possibility of creating a seperate file system inside of a folder on the SD card.  This would avoid the need to create a new partition, but they still expressed concern over what happens when the SD card is ejected.

Personally, I don’t think we will see this supported for a long time.  Many new phones are going with an increased internal memory to avoid this problem.  G1 owners are likely stuck with their limited spaced.

When is multi-touch coming to Android?

The Android team wants to support multi-touch, but no current hardware has the full functionality.  There was no mention of any rumors that Apple blocked this feature so I think we can lay that to rest.  It is simply a matter of having the displays available.

There is a hack released in some of the custom Android builds, but this is not true multi-touch.  The only use of the hack is for pinch zoom.  For a more detailed explanation of this, see Luke Hutchison’s blog post about the original hack.  To summarize, the G1 will never have true multitouch because of the hardware limitations and this feature was not blocked by Apple.

What do you think about rooting/hacking the G1?

The dev team acknoledged that users will hack their phones no matter what.  They would rather make the process easier in order to prevent people from bricking their phones.  They have encouraged the handset OEMs to ship bootloaders that allow custom flashing and believe this will cut down on false defective returns.  It was also mentioned that Google has made no effort to block the hacked phones so there should be no worry about ever losing root access to your G1.

One of our readers Dylan was with us and captured this video about the root question.  If you listen closely you can hear one of the guys say they read the XDA forums.

Android Dev Team on Root at Google I/O 2009 from Dylan Andersen on Vimeo.

We all got a free HTC Magic, newly rebranded as the Google Ion. It came complete in a custom box, has a custom boot screen, and have a Google I/O logo on the back. Also, the thing is tiny. I’m sure that’s been reported over and over, but man this thing feels awesome in my hand.

Head to Flickr and see ALL the pictures in high res goodness.