Google's Android widgetry was put online and open sourced when the first of the Android phones appeared Tuesday.

Google is calling it an "end-to-end software platform" and has challenged the open source community to use it for other purposes.

"Even if you're not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon," it said on a blog, "Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs and some of the best development tools I've ever worked with. Have a great idea for a new feature? Add it! As an open source project, the best part is that anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction. And if the platform becomes as ubiquitous as I hope it will, you may end up influencing the future of mobile devices as a whole."