The latest analytics released by ComScore have arrived and the good news continues to pour in for Android fans. Android OS platform has done considerably well in the past couple of months and brought the market share of Android OS to more than double, from what it was a quarter ago.

Three months back, Android was at 2.5% and the latest reports have confirmed that more than 5.2% of Mobile phones are now powered by Android OS. The overall market is still dominated by RIM at 41.6%, albeit, persistent downfall trend.

About the other platforms, iPhone OS grew up to 25.3%  whereas Windows Mobile and Palm saw a fall in their market share.

Android’s strong growth in the recent past has been an immediate ramification of star-studded Android phone launches, Motorola’s Droid and Google’s Nexus One in the fourth quarter. People are turning more curious and excited about Android than any other Mobile OS platform, especially Internet savvy users, who can’t expect a better platform than Android to provide an extravagant mobile web browsing experience.

Source : PCMag

Although Apple has got a tremendously populated App Store, that keeps attracting tons of users(and makes billions for Apple), it has become an iterative act of App store guards to keep bringing silly policies into action, making it more difficult for the third party developers to breathe easy.

Apple has recently taken a decision of banning use of “Android” keyword by any third party developer within Application’s description or anywhere else in app’s profile. Apple has strictly instructed the developers to abide by this new policy and avoid “Android” word while naming or describing their app. Violation will, of course, result in disapproval of app from making it to the App Store.

This means that if you’re an app developer for Android and have got some respectable success in Android Market with your app(s), you’re strictly prohibited to flaunt that success while pitching at the App Store.

This well thought step has been formulated to give minimal reasons for any App developer to put his time and money on building android app(s).

Not long back, Apple came up with another vague and senseless instruction for its developers, telling them to keep a distance from building apps that take user location data to deliver location targeted ads. Isn’t that Insane !

In their own words

If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.

Take it or leave it, Apple has been well known for building bullet-proof walls around its territory. They have and will keep doing whatever they can, to keep the open community within their control.

But most of the app developers have smelled the future and have already kept Android platform on priority for future app developments.

In a path-breaking move, Symbian announced its decision of turning Open source just couple of days back and that’s a sheer indication of the future of Mobile Industry. Symbian has been existent for ages and powers hundreds of millions of mobile devices across the globe. Still, it chose to go Open. Reason ? Because Future belongs to Open Source.

Apple’s firewalled policies are only short-sighted and makes its platform, a weak competitor for the future.

Millions of people witnessed the grand launch of Apple iPad on Jan 27 and entire web is consistently resonating with iPad buzz since then. After creating historic products such as iPod and iPhone, Apple has unveiled another revolutionary product, the iPad.

As tech specs of iPad depict clearly, iPad is a powerful machine that’s paper-thin and runs for over 10 hours without a re-charge. It’s an all purpose device that can function as an e-reader, as a laptop, as a multimedia device, as a wireless web browsing client and much more. Not to forget that almost all of iPhone apps would work well on the iPad as well.

But it’s not just about iPad as several other companies are joining the Tablet frenzy to compete with Apple. HP will start selling its tablet, HP Slate by mid 2010. Amazon and Sony are also gearing up to upgrade their e-readers into touch-sensitive, powerful tablet devices.

Now that iPad has plastered iPhone OS at its core and HP has locked Slate with Windows 7, there has to be a sleek touch tablet powered by open source Android OS, as Android’s benefits are not yet utilized by any of the known tablets.

Just like most of the iPhone apps would run without a glitch on the iPad (rich App Store is probably the deadliest weapon of Apple against any other tablet), Android has its own App Market growing to tens of thousands of Utility apps, which will undoubtly be an asset to any tablet device that keeps Android as its OS.

But its actually Google that can create the real magic with the tablet stuff. Compare Nexus One with any of the existent Android phones and you can easily figure out the difference that Google can make when it builds one. Same will be the case with a hypothetical Google Tablet, if Google decides to build one.

Earlier, we wrote a post on the China-Google issues and its possible effect of Android adoption in Chinese Mobile Phone market. Opposite to what was suspected by a WSJ journo, we asserted that Google’s withdrawal from Chinese search market will hardly have any repercussions on Android platform’s growth in China with couple of logical facts.

Now, our assertion has a heavy supporter, no other than Reuters. A recent news report from Reuters confirms the assertion we earlier proposed. Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology spokesman Zhu Hongren clearly stated that China will not limit adoption and future growth of any Mobile OS platform as long as it complies Chinese law.

Complying to national laws has never been an issue for Android platform, globally so China will not be an exception at all.

From Google’s perspective, Google.cn is a sole property of Google and Google reserves all the rights to shut it down or keep it running, whatsoever be the reason. For Android, it’s a different ball game altogether. Google leads Android development but doesn’t own Android as a whole.

Android has been picking up growth rate like never before and Chinese Mobile market is already excited with this new Mobile platform.

Now that Google has also entered into the territory of self branded smartphones with the Nexus One, it will be pretty hard for Google Android to stop from cruising fast, be it China or elsewhere.

A latest newspiece from WSJ suspects over Android’s future adoption in Chinese market after the latest move by Google of making a voluntary exit from the “firewalled” country. According to the editor, Android is a mirror image of Google(and not OHA) and with its growing awareness and herd of Android powered smartphones coming up this year, including the one from its own shelf(Nexus One), Google would be making a mistake by abandoning Chinese market, the country that accounts for one-sixth of world’s population and unarguably a prominent economy player globally.

Now we have a different stance on this. We’ve several reasons to justify that Google’s possible exit from China will hardly have any repercussions on the growth prospects of Android in China.

Without much ado, let’s get down to facts…

• Android is not a prerogative of Google. It’s Open Handset Appliance (OHA) that drives and directs Android platform. OHA accounts for over 65 companies worldwide, including Google and all these associated companies work collaboratively to make a better and evolved mobile standard. Although Google leads the OHA on software front but it’s an absolute mistake to consider Google as the sole proprietor of Android, especially when China Mobile ,the largest operator in China with over 500 million chinese userbase, is one of the core founding members of the OHA.
• Google is basically going to shut Google.cn and that’s just a search service from Google, albeit critical one. There are still countless other Google services such as Gmail, GMaps, Youtube, Google News, Blogger……. which are quite popular among chinese internet consumers already. All of them will remain available for Chinese folks. Now, why would a chinese buyer prohibit from buying an Android phone, when critical google services like Gmail, GMaps, Youtube etc are so seamlessly integrated within the phone.
• Chinese are rather sympathetic to Google and disheartened for the exit that Google will (most probably) announce. This actually indicates a plausible future support from chinese consumers for Android powered smartphones from emotional standpoint.

All the above stated reasons are strong enough to figure out that Android will not have to bear any repercussions if Google decides to exit chinese search market.

HTC HD2, as many of us know already, is probably the best ‘hardware capability’ phone from HTC till date and now it has made its way to Indian sub-continent as well. This is probably the best Christmas gift from HTC to smartphone fanbois in India.

But as speculated by us early on, it has been priced at a hefty sum of Rs.36990. This amount is fairly large and will hardly give strong reason to smartphone buyers in India to buy it for themselves.

Tata Docomo is selling HTC HD2 with a plan of 500 MB of monthly download limit for first 6 months. Not great but not bad at all either.

But factually, if any of the mobile phone operator in India needs to tap into huge Indian market, there’s a strong need of cheap contractual smartphones with 3G infrastructure backing it up. And when will that happen ? Don’t expect anything like that before 2013 or may be later than that.

Although NEXUS ONE, the Google Phone is already making the geek crowd crazy with its leaked snaps, an exclusive thing to NEXUS ONE, the next version of  Android OS has already been hacked by now. Now, if you carry a Moto Droid in your palms, you have got the chance of downloading and porting ‘hacked’ version of Android 2.1 on your beast smartphone.

The only problem with this hacked Android 2.1 version is that its Unstable right now. Even the site which is offering the download of the ‘yet to launch’ Android version is giving statuary warning on the site itself. At worse, this experiment can brick you Droid.

Even we wouldn’t recommend the download of this Unstable version of Android 2.1 until a completely stable version comes your way. To see the booting of Android 2.1 on Moto Droid, look at the video embedded below.

Credit

This weekend was wholly dedicated to Nexus One (the Google Phone) whose pictures flooded like anything across the Twitterverse. You could literally see tech bloggers and journalists turning into paparazzi for getting a glimpse of the breathtaking Google Phone. And yes, a huge count of Twitteratti has now witnessed what was limited to Googlers until two days back.

Here are some of the technical specifications of Nexus One known so far and some more pics taken by Googlers while playing with it in Googleplex. Now that most of us know the surprising fact that Nexus One (Google Phone) will be sold online by Google directly, bypassing any conventional retail sale structure, an even shocking surprise is that Nexus One will be sold unlocked.

Nowadays, most of the well hyped smartphones come locked with a mobile carrier, mainly to subsidize the phone pricing and in the middle of all this, Google deciding to launch Nexus One unlocked, would make it a costly affair for end users.

But staying unlocked will have its own advantage for Google Phone as well. Here are some of them…

• There will never be an embaressing situation for Google, similar to what Apple is facing right now, because of network incapabilities of a particular mobile carrier (AT&T for iPhone)
• All existing users using unlocked mobile subscription services will just have to buy Nexus One and put their in-use SIM cards into Nexus One and that’s it ! Users will also be able to opt for cheap internet plans due to non-exclusivity.
• We aren’t sure about it but if Nexus One will stay unlocked and will be sold Online by Google, it might be a case that Google will start selling it globally starting January. It means that Google will start getting millions of orders across the globe, not just from U.S. but elsewhere as well.

Nexus One might not be damn cheap but in the longer run, it will save more money to the buyers.

Stay hooked for more on Nexus One…

Sony Ericsson is planning to launch another Android phone called J10 but there are hardly any reasons to feel excited about it. We’re so used to touchscreen phones now that any conventional numberpad phone, specially when it’s coming up with Android Mobile OS at its heart, seems a dumb decision by the handset manufacturers. This time, the dumb manufacturer is Sony Ericsson.

This phone is rumored to be coming with 5mp camera and WiFi support but that’s not enough. The phone will most probably come unlocked and shouldn’t be more than $199 by any chance. According to the rumor mill, this phone is going to join the Greenheart line, which is good coz the manufacturing and packaging of the phone would be eco-friendly but the lame approach towards eco-friendly J10 isn’t something to appreciate about Sony Ericsson.

It’s not only smartphones and netbooks but also the nascent but hugely promising tablet industry, that’s seeking interest in Android has the open platform. The rumor mill isn’t stopping to boast about Apple Applet but in reality, many internet tablets have made their way to the market already.

Surprisingly, two of the very few tablets out there are Android powered ! Take a look at these Android tablets !

Camangi WebStation

It ’s a newly launched Android tablet that’s primarily meant for web browsing but isn’t limited to doing just that. It also multi-functions as digital photo frame, music player and e-book reader as well. It comes with a 7 inches touchsecreen and able to show pictures with a resolution of 800 pixels by 480 pixels.

It comes with in-built support for WiFi 802.11 b/g and MicroSD Card for data storage. The device looks cool and ready to sell at a price of $399.

Archos’ Tablet

Archos 5 Internet tablet is an Android powered tablet which boasts a 4.8-inches touchscreen and serves all basic entertainment and communication requirements such as pictures, video, GPS, basic gaming and web browsing, of course. Storage capacity goes upto 250 GB.

The price is much cheaper than Camangi WebStation by the way. You can grab it at mere $250.

More Android tablets are about to turn up next year. Stay tuned !