During recent Google event that took place in Mountain view, there’s something extraordinary that has landed in favor of Android. An app that could easily be one of the most desirable geek fantasies is now a reality for Android phone users running Android 1.6 and above, i.e. Donut or Eclair (poor iPhone fans).

Branded as Google Goggles, this latest Android app from Google empowers you to take a snap of various things such as landmarks, books, artwork, places, wine, company logos etc and use that snap as a search input to explore associated stuff about it on the web.

For instance, if you come across a novel in a library, you can instantly take a snap of coverpage of that novel through your Android phone and search about that novel through Google Goggles Android app. Similarly, you can snap and search about dvds, landmarks, places etc.

As Google admits by itself, Visual search through Goggles android app is in nascent stage and shouldn’t be assumed perfect at all. You can’t just start snapping pictures here and there from your android phone and expect magical stuff from Google. It’s only a start of an unexplored search landscape and further development is pretty much in progress from Google’s end. You can notice that Google Goggles is still a part of Google labs.

For now, android phone owners (present and future) have a huge thing to boast about. They’ve got the power to search visually. Love you Google !

Well, just for information sake, it has got nothing to do with Gmail Goggles !

A recent analysis from IDC experts boasts about 10 predictions for  the year 2010. One of them is about the App trends for the year 2010. Nobody is really surprised with the obvious prediction being made that mobile apps are going to multiply tremendously in the year 2010.

As Apple is aggressively leading the App world with over 120k apps in its store and Android is chasing it fiercely with some 20k apps in Android Market, the future of mobile apps is just awesome. Apple is expected to double (may be triple) its current app count and Android is expected to hit 100k apps mark by end of 2010.

With more and more cellphone users switching to smartphones for regular use, hundreds of millions of apps are expected to be downloaded each and every month by end users. With plenty of android phones lined up for launch in 2010 already, industry experts are emphatically anticipating that Android population might surpass iPhone userbase by 2010 end, which would make this growing competition more interesting and fierce than what it is now.

PCWorld says that there might be an App Explosion in the year 2010, we bet, it will be an App Supernova ! But we have some doubts over the quality of apps delivered to end users. We hope, Google has some definite plans for quality assurance of android apps as well.

Timely surprises seem to be an integral part of The Cult of Android now. At one side, we keep hearing about product launches of latest android handsets and on other side, the number of android apps keep on piling up within App Market.

But today, there’s something to share that’s probably been attempted for the first time in the short history of world of mobile apps. All android fanatics have something to cheer about. They now have privilege to download an all exclusive ‘Adults Only’ App store called Mikandi, which is NOT available for iPhone, Symbian and other popular mobile platforms at the moment.

As the App store is ‘Adults Only’, the apps are definitely going to be ‘A Rated’ and will not face any approval process before becoming a part of Mikandi. Mikandi will give third party developers, a platform to freely deliver and market their adult apps without bothering about approval procedures and similar stuff.

On the other side, users will be required to download Mikandi App store on their smartphones, after which they will be able to access and download free and paid apps under Mikandi App Store.

One big reason why Mikandi has landed on Android and not iPhone is because of the stringent app approval procedures that iPhone lets every app pass through. Looking at the past treatment of Apple with 18+ apps, adult app developers are hardly interested in spending time and money on pornish app development.

On a darker side, as users need to download Mikandi app store on their android phones explicitly, it will be very tough for Mikandi to manage a large userbase out of the android population, which would result in poor interest from app developer’s point of view. We doubt if Mikandi will really take off that well but who knows…

Anyways, adult stuff lovers now have a strong reason to buy an android phone, isn’t it !

Here’s an introductory video of Mikandi. Take a look !

According to a recent study by Skyhook Wireless, a large majority(over 80%) of  Third party app developer community feels dissatisfied with the current state of Android Market, making it difficult for them to keep investing time and money in building apps for Android platform.

Such an analysis brings no surprises to us as we ourselves wrote about the inefficiencies of Android Market and ways by which Google can cover up the pot holes and make things better for Android Marketplace. According to the survey, one good thing about Android that came out is that most of the developers are very much excited about Android as an open platform and want to keep building apps for it. The current problem with developers is only the weak financial returns as a result of poor Android app download volume in case of most of the app developers.

Most often, android app download comparisons are made with App Store but the developer community isn’t accounting the fact that App Store entertains tens of millions of iPhone user demands, which isn’t the case with newer competitor, Android. The volume sales for Android apps will certainly take more time as the Android userbase is on the verge of explosion(but not exploded yet).

Year 2010 has tens of android phones lined up for launch and things will only get tough for iPhone to breathe. Developers who’re little frustrated with the current Android Market very well know about the bright scope of Android and can’t afford to leave it, just because their returns aren’t encouraging at the moment.

On one side, there’s a populated App Store from Apple that restricts apps from entering App Store every now and then, which leaves developers with too little options left and go seek early bird opportunities in Android Marketplace.

With spectacular response to Motorola Droid, the market sentiments for the future of Android have only become stronger. One thing that’s definitely needed for Android now is to enhance Android Marketplace and make it as lucrative place for developers as App Store.

The growing interest of mobile application developers towards Android platform isn’t stopping at all. Finally, the popular Mobile VOIP Application, Fring, has become available for Android Devices including the latest rage, Motorola Droid.

Just explore Fring in Android Market or just head over to their website and downlaod the version of Fring that’s customized for your mobile. Fring helps you make VOIP calls over internet data plan or WiFi through any of the popular IM clients such as Skype, GTalk, MSN, Yahoo! and many others.

It is just the beginning of the drift of the third party developer community towards Android platform because of its openness and future growth prospects compared to firewalled iPhone OS and its App Store.

This version of Fring comes with an integration with Twitter as well. If you’ve got an android phone, go check it out !