I’ve been working on and about Android from last couple of months. I ended up learning few nice things about android from XDA developers and web sites of few other android hackers/developers. Starting with few bad things - No android phone is released in India yet - Google/HTC - WTF ? Ofcourse, Google is selling its ADP1 (Android Developer Phone 1, in other words completely SIM unlocked HTC Dream a.k.a TMobile G1) for Indian crowd, but the phone+shipping can become unnecessarily expensive. But,  anyway few lucky folks with friends coming from US, who went to US or whose company is good enough to provide them with an Android phone (Yay !!) are lucky enough to get their hands on HTC Dream. But, anyway not-so lucky guys can always get the awesome emulator from Android site. Coming to the interesting things that you can do with your phone, well, these are NOT for guys who are scared of command line, who do not understand terms like root, or people who are just too scared of spoiling their phones and ESPECIALLY NOT for people who doesnt RTFM. If you are wondering what the hell is RTFM, you might want to buy an iPhone ;) Kidding anyway. Android is awesome platform out of the box, but it can be done more awesome by doing some nicer stuff to it. Now, you should know few things/terms here.

1. ADP1 - Android Developer Phone 1 (Google branded, Black one with fancy design on it) - images
2. G1 - T Mobile G1 (Black/White TMobile branded phone with Google logo on the back) - images
3. G2/Magic/Sapphire (Vodafone branded HTC Magic phone, G2 - is just made up by people. Sapphire is probably HTC code name) - images
4. Google Ion - HTC Magic phone given by Google the attendees of 2009 Google I/O conference

Now, all the above phones + few more phones (chinese stuff like Lenovo Ophone etc.,) run Android. So, if you get your hands on any of the above phones, you can do few nice things with it.

1. Root the Phone Rooting the phone - simply means that you get ‘root’ access on the phone. So, unless you possess root you cannot feel the true potential of your Android (linux) phone. But .. wait … what is root ? If that is your question, you wasted 5 minutes of your precious time by reading this useless post. You can simply return your useless linux phone and live with a Nokia phone happily ever after.Rooting is a fairly simple process if you RTFM. But, beware that it can brick(break) your phone if you are careless. So, if at all you decide to root your phone, DO read the instructions carefully on XDA or Android-Dls.com and the try it.
2. Change the bootloader This is not a fancy thing that you can do with your phone, but more of an essential thing if you decide to play with your phone. Check this thread on XDA and install the Hard SPL. G1s will have the default G1 Original SPL, where as ADP1 will have Engineering SPL. I’m just not sure what SPL does Ion and Magic have (probably the newer one which is not listed on that page). HardSPL is the recommended one.There is a newer SPL (1.33.2005) which actually bricked many phones. This SPL is the most useful as it increases system and data partitions of your phone by 30 megs each. Which means, you can do more fancy stuff with your phone. If you decide to go with this SPL, - Do check your Board type … and research on which board you can install, Make sure that flashed your phone with latest Radio, And make sure that you will never go back to older radios on the phone.The essential part of modifying SPL is you can apply NBH update files (I hardly did this), and flash nand backups (I do this a LOT). Its simply means, you can take back up of your phone and save them on your computer, and whenever you manage to spoil your phone, *if you have Engg./HardSPL* you can simply flash that backup back on your phone.
3. Install the ‘n’ awesome ‘custom’ android builds Simon Walker is maintaining a very good list with all the available Android Builds, features, requirements, dates etc., here. If you’ve time, try out all of them and stick to the one you like ‘teh best’. Each of them is great in its own way.
4. Compile your own ‘Android’ distro If you are more into ‘my own’ things, you can always download the android source and build the images for your ‘dream’ (Only Dream is released ADP1, thats why Google has instructions only for building for HTC Dream. But, by the time you play a lot with those Custom builds And your own distro (#3 and #4 points here), you will understand how you can play with your ‘Magic’. And there is XDA all the time.
5. Edit your boot splash screens and theme your distro Same as what it tells. There is no better way to show your love for customization than changing your Splash screen or making your own theme for your phone. Well, you can start that by reading stuff here
6. Wifi/Bluetooth Tether It just means that you can share your phone’s internet (Edge/GPRS/3G) connection to your computer over wifi. The whole process is simplified a lot by few applications. I suggest Android Wifi Tether which is just an awesome opensource application. The whole process needs some  features enabled on your kernel, so, it works only on rooted phones with kernel with iptables and netfilter support
7. And few more and just don’t forget to do some kickass things like using applications Shopsavvy, Locale, Wikitude, Twidroid, Barcode Scanner, Google latitude, Google Skymap. You can find all the list of applications available in Google Android Market over web at Cyrket (No, its not Cricket, its Cyrket)
8. …. and try to be a Hero This is more related to #3. But, this is so awesome that it does need a separate point to talk about. Install HTC Hero with Rosie UI. This requires you to know fairly enough about Android builds. Anyway, you can see the Rosie demo for yourself on Youtube here

Out of the endless possibilities of ‘awesome’ things, these are few nice things that you can do with your Android phone. Anyway, as usual I take no responsibility for what ever you do with your phone. No, I’m not going to help you with rooting your phone or any other thing here. I gave links to the sources of information and you can learn easily from them.