ANDROID PHONES

I was first introduced to the word Android when I watched Star Wars and was charmed by C3PO, the golden android.  As a refresher, an android is a robot or synthetic organism designed to look and act like a human.  Just now, there was an advertisement on the sidebar of this blog about Android Phones.  Hmm ... I know that it is a handphone for sure but when I did a search on the Internet I became confused with the technical jargon.  The one below is slightly more reader friendly than others and I could get an idea.

Android™ is a new mobile operating system developed by Google. It is totally open source, allowing anyone to develop for it without having to pay fees. That means it is constantly new and evolving, with thousands of new apps available on the Android™ Market, with more to follow. It also comes with pre-loaded Google services like Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube.

Anyway, I figure that all this technical stuff should be left to those who developed the gizmo, what I gather is that the functions for the Android Phone must be a great improvement to those already in the market and what it can do would be amazing.

Now is there someone out there who can explain all the technical stuff in simple layman terms?  I am interested to get myself one to keep abreast with the times.