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“Every Google phone works differently, and you have fragmentation,” he said. And indeed that is a common worry among developers who don’t want their applications to be incompatible with certain phones that have unusual screen sizes or features. But then again, Windows Mobile, which has been around for nearly 10 years, already has that same problem, and one of Microsoft’s chief goals in upcoming versions is to rein in the variations between Windows Mobile handsets.

With this week's release of Verizon Wireless' Droid phone comes the first real test of the potential for fragmentation with Android. The Droid will be the first phone to run Android 2.0. After it goes on sale Friday, there will be Android phones on the market running three different versions of the OS.

Google gave an equally vague answer to questions about which phones might be upgraded and if any of them had hardware limitations that might prevent an upgrade. "Because Android is open source, all software updates we release are available for carriers and handset makers to take and update their current or future Android-powered devices," Katie Watson, a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail.

With the introduction of Android version 1.6, support was added different screen sizes.  The platform does a nice job of letting developers tell the market what size screens their app supports, but that’s only half the story.

This means that every game will have to support 6 unique screen configurations in order to look its best on every phone!