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.

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

With recent leak of HTC’s portfolio of first half of 2010 on the web, it’s clear that HTC is heavily betting on Android as their Mobile platform and Windows Mobile 6.5 is, well, on the backseat of course. Still, one big shot from HTC that was speculated to get an Android treatment has gone in favor of Windows Mobile, its HTC HD2.

A monstrous touch screen(over 4 inches), 5MP camera with autofocus and LED Flash and lighterning fast processor, makes HTC HD2 stand apart. It may take years most other OEMs to beat such a swashbuckling hardware configuration.

But we feel sad to say that HTC, although going Android for almost all its High end smartphones, has exclusively gone for Windows Mobile 6.5 as its OS. To us, it seems thatHD2 is a

“Old Generation Software over a Next Generation Hardware“

The only reason HTC puts forward when questioned about No Android policy for HD2 is that they have to take care of Windows Mobile as well. Well, that’s just Microsoft !

Well, many folks are also interested when HTC HD2 is going to enter Indian markets. And at what cost will it priced. HTC has announced that HTC HD2 will enter European and Asian markets first and then U.S. markets will follow up.

It will soon be available in HTC retailers in India and the price is suspected to be between Rs.35-40k

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.

The latest news from the Android World is that Google has acquired Mobile AD Platform, ADMob for a whopping $750Mn. We must admit that we’re surprised by this acquisition, not because of ADMob’s acquisition but the price at which it has been acquired by Google.

AdMob was already a known name in mobile advertising industry, mainly on the iPhone platform within applications and now, Google has bought this Mobile Advertising startup mainly because Google has its own Mobile OS, Android competing against iPhone platform.

This would make Apple more dependent on Google as iPhone has been making hefty profits from mobile advertising solution, served by AdMob and Android will certainly be AdMob’s first priority for obvious reasons.

One of the main reasons why Google acquired AdMob at such a high valuation might be the growing competition with Apple in Mobile industry landscape. Sooner or later, AdMob’s acquisition was certain, by either Apple or Google. But Google closed the deal quite swiftly, leaving no chance for Apple to become the third angle in the acquisition deal.

Google has been a pioneer in internet advertising space and now, after acquiring AdMob, it has got an unbeatable lead in Mobile Advertising space as well. Here’s how Google explains graphically what AdMob specialises into.

Now, its going to be a bigger challenge for iPhone to have a face-off with Android, as things have started favoring Android in many regards…Best of Luck, Apple !

It seems that the ‘iPhone cult’ is about to halt anyway. Everyone is talking Droid nowadays. The latest phone from Motorola that’s about to hit the market within a week from now(Nov 6), also happens to be the first android phone on Verizon Wireless, the largest 3G wireless service provider. So, when three industry heavyweights, namely Motorola(Hardware), Verizon Wireless(3G Network) and Google(Mobile OS, Android 2.0) come together, the outcome has to be something spectacular. And it is…Droid is truly spectacular !

With amazing hardware capabilities and next generation Mobile operating system (Android 2.0), this  smartphone was already making the news almost everyday during last couple of weeks. It was yesterday when the official site Droiddoes.com revealed the curtains and announced the feature specifications, pricing details and date of official launch of Motorola Droid. It will cost a sum of $199 with a 2 yr contract with Verizon Wireless in US.

The odds are against Apple at the moment. The recent fuss over Google Voice iPhone app rejection and FCC’s involvement into the matter painted a patchy image of Apple in front of the world. AT&T 3G network has already failed to handle the network overload caused by millions of iPhones, leaving iPhone buyers in a miserable state and now utility Google apps (Google Voice and the latest one is Google Maps Navigation) is no more for iPhone as well. Every prospective smartphone buyer was looking for a superior alternative to iPhone. Coming January, the 2 year AT&T contract bundled with iPhone will start clearing up and the market perception is already going strong towards choosing an Android phone (Droid seems ideal) over iPhone.

Look at the coolest stuff that Droid brings along, if you’re still unaware about it.

The battalion of android phones is already making iPhone look pale and now Droid has not left even a single reason for iPhone fanbois to cheer for.

By the way, it is unclear if Motorola Droid will be launched in India or not We will track that too.

We will have you regularly updated with happenings with Droid…Keep checking !

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