Google impressed at last week’s I/​O con­fer­ence. They demoed Android 2.2, “Froyo”, which is already avail­able for Google’s own Nexus One phone. (It’s com­ing “soon” for carrier-​branded hand­sets like Verizon’s Droid Incred­i­ble and Sprint’s EVO.) They showed mSpot, a new ser­vice that does a lot of what LaLa.com did before Apple bought it and shut it down: allow peo­ple to upload their entire music libraries and then stream them to any Mac, Win­dows PC or Android hand­set. The bar, it is raised.

In par­tic­u­lar, Froyo is over twice as fast as the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of Android (2.1, or “Éclair”), the webkit-​based browser — basi­cally Chrome-​lite — is faster still, and it sup­ports a fully func­tional imple­men­ta­tion of Adobe’s Flash 10.1, mean­ing it can dis­play all those web pages where Safari on the iPhone and iPad just show you that silly lit­tle blue Lego. Add to that the nearly stan­dard specs for this gen­er­a­tion of Android phones — 480x800 AMOLED screens, remov­able bat­ter­ies, 5MP or bet­ter cam­eras, with flashes, microSD card expan­sion — and the still expand­ing Android Mar­ket­place — where you can find office suites like Quick­Of­fice and Doc­u­ments To Go, EPUB ebook read­ers, Skype, and well, a func­tional equiv­a­lent to just about any­thing in the iTunes App Store — and we got our­selves a ball game!

A lot of peo­ple com­pare the iPhone to a phone like the HTC Incred­i­ble and just look at the hard­ware. But the game is really much big­ger than that. You’re not buy­ing a phone. You’re buy­ing into an ecosys­tem. It’s like mar­ry­ing into a fam­ily, and bears just as much fore­thought and cau­tion. You’re not just look­ing at an Android-​based smart­phone. To get the most out of it, you’re going to want to cou­ple it with all the other parts of the Google ecosys­tem. Gmail for your email and con­tacts. Google Cal­en­dar for your sched­ul­ing. Ama­zon and MSpot for your media. Google book­marks. Google Chrome as your desk­top browser. Google Reader for your RSS feds. I won’t sug­gest your switch from Twit­ter to Google Buzz for social net­work­ing, but it’s there.

Right now I’m about halfway sub­merged in the shiny, mul­ti­color Google lifestyle. I do use Gmail, Cal­en­dar, Reader. I’ve used Chrome as my default browser. I’ve kept my doc­u­ments in Google Docs. It wouldn’t be hard at all for me to walk into a Ver­i­zon store, plop down a cou­ple of Ben­jamins — and pay AT&T their Early Ter­mi­na­tion Fee, since I’ve only been with them just over a year — and walk out with an Incred­i­ble. (I’d have to wait to play with it until I got it home, though, since AMOLED screens are nearly use­less in sun­light. Hell, even vam­pires do bet­ter these days.) The Android, it calls. Plus, just look at this list of five rea­sons to be afraid of Apple. Why wouldn’t I want to go all in with a com­pany whose motto is “don’t be evil”?

But Apple. Ah, Apple. There’s a rea­son the apple fea­tures as the sym­bol of temp­ta­tion in every­thing from Gen­e­sis to Snow White. Mis­ter Jobs knows him some pretty when he sees it. iPhone own­ers have a more emo­tional, vis­ceral con­nec­tion to their phones than even other smart­phone own­ers. My iPhone 3G is damn near grafted to me, and the iPhone HD due out just two weeks is even more gorgeous.

Where Google preaches open and flex­i­ble, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, Apple tells us not to worry our pretty lit­tle heads, they’ll make every­thing all right. As long as you agree with His Steve­ness — and why wouldn’t you, he has impec­ca­ble taste — you’ll get every­thing you need.

And Apple, if they do as expected, is set to bring the ecosys­tem to play too. We — yes, that is a mouse in my pocket — expect Apple to announce more than just the new pretty iPhone HD at WWDC on June 7th. We expect them to announce that email, cal­en­dar and con­tacts sync­ing com­po­nents of MobileMe will be free to any iPhone user. We expect them to announced iTunes 10 with the new “iTunes Live” fea­ture to allow sync­ing your whole iTunes library to Apple’s new ginor­mous dat­a­cen­ter in North Car­olina, from whence you can stream it all to your iPhone HD (and maybe 3GS, but prob­a­bly not the older, RAM-​challenged orig­i­nal iPhone and 3G). Basi­cally, we expect them to at the very least match Google fea­ture for fea­ture. And maybe up the ante with Steve’s “one more thing.”

And it would just as easy for me to fall into the wel­com­ing sleek­ness of the Apple ecosys­tem. I already buy my music and movies from iTunes, so why not my books as well? iBooks will be built into iPhone OS4. I could move my cal­en­dar, con­tacts and email into MobileMe. My email address, jeff@kirv.in, already redi­rects to Gmail, so I’d just have the redi­rect point to MobileMe instead. Same with iTunes Live. My media col­lec­tion is in iTunes already, so this is a no-​brainer. And from there, I could switch to Safari as my desk­top browser so I can sync my book­marks, and even­tu­ally just buy a shiny 27” iMac as my new media cen­ter. And hey, at least Apple is the devil I know. Look at this list of five rea­sons to be afraid of Google.

But wait a minute. I’m sup­posed to be a Bud­dhist, also known as “the mid­dle way.” I’m bipo­lar. I’m a Gem­ini. I’m a gor­ram reg­is­tered Inde­pen­dent. Why can’t I have both?

This is, after all, the true strength of the cloud. And the cloud is big­ger than Google. It’s big­ger than Apple. I can keep my book­marks in Xmarks. I can buy my books from Google Edi­tions, which will sell ebooks sans DRM so they can be read any­where, on any­thing. I’ll keep buy­ing media from iTunes, because Apple’s just made it so darn easy, and at least the music is DRM-​free. I use Fire­fox as my desk­top browser, Thun­der­bird and Light­ning for email and sched­ul­ing. Seesmic for social net­work­ing, Ever­note for ran­dom data, Instapa­per for saved arti­cles, Drop­box for my files and man­u­scripts, Bing as my default search engine. And of course, a jail­bro­ken iPhone that has all the fea­tures of OS4 on OS 3.13, synced to Google for con­tacts, email and calendar.

This might not work for­ever. As the rivalry between Google and Apple heats up, they might not inter­op­er­ate — a fancy word for “play nice” — as well as they do today. I might be forced into MobileMe if I want to keep push syn­chro­niza­tion on my iPhone HD. But for as long as I can, I’m going to avoid going “all in” with any one com­pany. Because really, I’m afraid of them all.