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If you don't like the way the e-mail program on your PC works, you can replace it with one you like better. And when you need to add a new capability to Firefox, you can simply install an extension. But such flexibility doesn't apply to most cell phones, since cellular providers restrict how you use a device that's in your face--or pressed to your face--for sometimes hours a day.

That's about to change. In the coming year cell phones will start opening up, allowing users to customize their handsets' interfaces, run any program, and, most important, gain access to underlying hardware for finding directions, making calls over Wi-Fi, and taking pictures.

Eventually, experts say, you'll also see devices such as cameras, camcorders, and other gadgets gain access to cellular data networks, even though they'll never be used to make a phone call.

Google Leads the Way

Sparking the move toward cell phone openness is Google, flexing its billion-dollar muscles. Google's primary motivation, not surprisingly, appears to be putting more advertisements in front of more eyeballs. In a closed cellular world, wireless carriers can control what their subscribers see. Open up the system, and Google and other parties can dive in and begin to compete for your attention.

By mid-2007 Google and other Internet giants had convinced the Federal Communications Commission to require that any company that won a January auction for a set of national cellular wireless licenses must allow consumers to use any device and any legal application on that company's network. Furthermore, late in the year Google, along with three dozen partners, unveiled plans to construct an open-source cellular phone platform known as Android.

At least initially, Android is probably what you'll hear most about when the topic of cell-phone openness arises. Because Android is open source, and because the Open Handset Alliance that is behind the platform has agreed to permit remarkably deep access to the OS, any two Android-based devices could be quite dissimilar.

Simple Android applications and the standard interface will be common among such devices. But Android developers can produce unique approaches to navigating through menus and options, or they can allow you to choose from, or later install, dramatically different graphical user interfaces.

The approach is deeper than the "skins" often used to put a thin interface overlay over a piece of software. Instead, the experience will be as if you could boot up Windows Vista and replace Aero with an iPhone interface while still accessing the same programs and data.

Android will also allow application developers easy access to all of the hardware that may be installed on a phone, including GPS chips, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cell radios, cameras, and other less common options.