Come the end of the year, Android (Google's mobile phone platform) could be a fine replacement for the ol' iPhone. Seriously. Check out some of the apps those smart folks over at MIT have already come up with:
Loco
Loco is a mobile social network built on top an Android phone’s contact manager, so anyone in your contacts is already your friend, so to speak. You’ll be able to view and track where your friends are located using Google Maps and real-time geolocation. So, in essence, you can check out the scene at a few places before you commit to going all the way across town.
Locale
Locale is a dynamic settings manager. You set up different settings for your phone based on time and location. So when you’re at home, you can automatically have all your calls forwarded to your home phone line. When you’re at work, you can have your phone set to silent mode and have your phone’s background screen set to a constantly updating work chart.
GeoLife
GeoLife is basically your to-do list on top of Google Maps. When you get within a certain range of something you need to pick up, it alerts you.
It also works as a traditional to-do list for things that aren’t location-based. The team that put this together is also working on a route-creation system wherein you could pick a few important items from your list and then have a route plotted out for you to follow that day.
And that's just three of the seven apps reviewed at TechCrunch. No, I don't think paying an extra $20 a month for data is worth it for the iPhone. (Yeah, that could change when the iPhone SDK comes out.) But I'd be willing to shell out the extra cash to get access to those kinds of programs.