Google has recently made Android, its new mobile operating system and application stack, open source. Off the back of this, I expect there to be some interest around using Android to power consumer electronic devices not necessarily limited to mobile phones. I can't imagine why Android could not be used to power the next generation of intelligent kitchen appliances or set top boxes in addition to the communication device carried in your pocket.
Android as a whole sits on top of a Linux operating system that has been customized to run on resource limited devices. The real value-add is in the application environment that Android provides for people who choose to use it as a platform. Features are largely commoditized, robustness and elegance of the user experience is where product differentiation can really occur. Flash based interfaces and tactile UIs on devices like the Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface have raised expectations around what a dynamic UI should aspire to. However, implementing all the transitions, rotations and blends in a usable framework from scratch tends to be significant amount of the engineering effort, effort that could probably be better spent on building out the vision of the product. Android gives you a prebaked framework for that vision. You have a platform that has already designed solutions for laying out controls and transitioning views while at the same time providing a relatively simple framework for customising behaviour and presentation.
There are some considerations around using a Linux 2.6 kernel as the base operating system. Perhaps it may have been better to use a OS that had been built from the ground up for an environment that will typically not have access to swap space or may have realtime thread scheduling requirements. On the flip side, Linux is widely adopted in the micro PC space and sourcing development resources to write device drivers for your custom hardware is an lower barrier than with some of the other options.
In addition, because the application layer is implemented in Dalvik Java, a large resource base is readily available when it comes to implementing your solution on Android. With most of the J2SE library available to applications in addition to the Android specific ones, you could stop dealing with network events, blitting operations and API parsing and move on to building a really involving experience.
