It’s the end of June, and I find myself mulling my next phone choices with a certain sense of anxious excitement. I currently have a Blackberry Pearl which I like pretty well (it’s certainly a lot lighter and smaller than my previous Treo 650, but I miss the touchscreen sometimes). Besides the rumors of an upcoming touchscreen-enabled Blackberry, there are two choices on the horizon: the Apple iPhone 3G and a Google Android-enabled smartphone.

The iPhone 3G is sure to have the same incredibly intuitive UI and clever tricks I’ve come to love in my MacBook Air. Apple has a way of wrapping sophisticated features in an instinctive user interface to which it owes a great deal of its success. And its new development platform will bring the same sort of cool innovation we’ve come to expect on Facebook, not from the site providing the platform itself, but to the thousands of clever minds that finally have a way to distribute their ideas. The iPhone’s biggest drawbacks - the lack of video recording, Flash support, cut-and-paste, and MMS - could conceivably be supported by third-party apps. Native support would be nice, but this might be a signal from Apple that they’re going to focus on hardware and OS over functions, and it might be an incentive for app developers to migrate away from Android.

The gPhone is really nothing more than an OS and applications platform. We have no idea what forms the gPhone will take, or from what manufacturers first, but we do know these for sure: there will be easy Google Apps integration, there will probably be an apps platform, and, yes, there were most certainly be ads. Lots of them. In Google’s neverending quest to secure more ad inventory, accessing the burgeoning mobile ad market would be a whole lot tougher without a ready default delivery platform. Like Apple, Google will be sure to dangle carrots in front of app developers in order to encourage them to create for the Android platform.

I have about a couple of weeks to make a decision if I want to participate in the first-day euphoric rush at the Apple Store. If I decide to pass, I’ll consign myself to searching the news every day for announcements about the HTC Dream and enviously watching friends play with the iPhone 3G in the meantime.