google android

Google's open or Apple's integrated: Whose side are you on? It's war! Again. Or still. Whatever. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched an "epic rant" during an earnings call this week blasting Google's "fragmented," er, "open" approach to apps and extolling the virtues of Apple's "closed," I mean "integrated" iOS platform.

More than half (55 percent) of all Google Android smartphones use 'Éclair' or version 2.1 of the mobile phone OS.

Have a laptop but no Wi-Fi? Turn your Android phone into a modem and get your computer connected to the Net in seconds.

Friends, readers, Kindlemen: Allow me to pose a question. If you could get digital books on the smartphone you already carry, would you still buy a dedicated e-reader?

Forget about Flash on the iPhone and iPad: Adobe, it seems, has turned its attention elsewhere. The company used the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco to show off a mysterious Google Android tablet that was running Flash flawlessly.

Has any smartphone had a more unusual marketing campaign than the Nexus One? Google's touchscreen Android handset debuted in January to mostly favorable reviews--PC World gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars--but sales since then have been less than stellar. In March, mobile research firm Flurry reported that Google had sold only 135,000 Nexus Ones in the first 74 days after the phone's launch. By comparison, about a million Motorola Droids and Apple iPhones were sold in the same period following their respective rollouts.

It may no longer be the hot phone du jour, but Motorola's Droid appears to still be leading the way when it comes to Android devices.

It looks like Apple isn't the only one losing control of its smartphones--Engadget reports that a slew of Dell handsets were leaked on Wednesday, including a high-end Windows Phone 7 handset (the "Lightning"), and three Android phones.

Verizon says on Thursday it will update its Motorola Droid phone to the latest Android 2.1 software juicing the handset with multitouch pinch-to-zoom capabilities and adding live wallpaper. Verizon customers have been eagerly awaiting the update ever since Motorola said the upgrade would occur in early February in "one week" - but it never happened.

So you told your boss that you bought your Android smartphone so that you could track your business calls, be more effective when traveling for your company, have easy access to Gmail and keep your organization's Twitter feed current. But we know what's really going on -- you got that smartphone because it was cool and because you wanted to play with all the apps. (And possibly because it wasn't Apple or AT&T.)

AT&T may have opened its arms to Android with the release of Motorola's Backflip, but it isn't exactly embracing the platform's open nature.

Android users, get ready to give your phone the finger.