Clint Boulton

Motorola Mobility announced first quarter earnings of $3 billion April 28, up 22 percent from the first quarter of 2010. The company said it shipped 4.1 million Android handsets and 250,000 Motorola Xoom Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” tablets. The Xoom numbers pale in comparison to the 4.7 million iPads Apple sold in its first quarter, but […]

Google April 28 finally rolled out its own video chat application for Android smartphones, fitting Google Talk with the same voice and video chat capabilities it leverages for the desktop version. Now when users access their Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next to their contacts. Talk users will […]

There’s a lot to say about Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry),” published last month by The University of California Press. Let me start with this: If the Justice Department and/or the Federal Trade Commission are interested in launching broad antitrust lawsuits into Google’s search practices, it would do well […]

Google Android smartphone unit sales declined from 53 percent to 50 percent from the fourth quarter to the first quarter, thanks largely to the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4 on Verizon Wireless. Apple iOS share rose 9 percentage points to command 28 percent of smartphone unit sales for the quarter, according to NPD Group’s new […]

The U.S. Army has a new weapon to use in combat situations: a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system. The Joint Battle Command-Platform, also known as the JBC-P Handheld, is the first Android mobile handset developed by the Army for tactical operations. The smartphone includes mapping application that leverages GPS to help soldiers navigate […]

Google paid out a record $16,500 to developers for plugging 27 Chrome Web browser vulnerabilities, paving the way for the launch of the Chrome 11. Chrome 11, which launched to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux April 27, includes such perks as speech input translation. Chromium development community members and other tinkerers of […]

Google April 27 released a native Google Docs application for Android with a nifty feature that lets users turn photos with text into documents that may be edited from smartphones. Google Docs app for Android, intended for download from the Android Market by folks with English phones running Android 2.1 and later, lets users tap […]

Moncks Corner The exterior of Google’s data center in Moncks Corner, S.C., is deliberately nondescript. Down on Googles Server Farm Google each year custom-crafts thousands of servers running a barebones version of the Linux operating system. Some have said Google owns and operates more than 1 million servers, powering search, Google Maps, Google apps and […]

Google has revised its Google Apps for Business pricing to make it more attractive to small businesses, offering a $5 per user, per month plan that follows Microsoft’s flexible pricing scheme. The search engine also lowered its paid service entry level from shops with 50 users to 10, an effort to make more money from […]

Sprint said it is launching its Samsung Nexus S 4G smartphone May 8 for 199.99 with a two-year contract, adding another speedy Android handset to the next-generation WiMax network mix. Google introduced the first Samsung Nexus S Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” device last December, offering it unlocked or with a $179.99 contract from T-Mobile. Powered by […]

Remember back in October 2007 when Google acquired Jaiku, the mobile microblogging tool? Some people, including myself, thought the startup would become for Google what Dodgeball didn’t: a viable entree into the world of mobile social networking. As I wrote on this blog then: “Jaiku enables users to post thoughts, converse, and share photos, blog […]

Google April 26 added merchant sales reporting to its Android Market, the latest tweak in the application store’s perpetual evolution toward improving quality and service. Developers will be able to access monthly reports from the Android Market Developer Console that detail the financial performance of their applications. The sales reports leverage financial data from Google […]