tag = "Android"

Motorola's hopes of a glorious comeback in the mobile market are resting on a new mobile from the company - the Android-powered Dext with the new MotoBlur overlay.

The idea is simple - take the open source benefits of Android and bring a number of social networking sites together into one widget-filled home screen, placed under the hood of a fairly decent hardware spec list.

T-Mobile UK this morning announced the Pulse, the first pay-as-you-go Android 1.5 smartphone and the third coming from the network operator.

Available for £180 starting October exclusively on T-Mobile, it boasts a 3.5″ HVGA touchscreen display, the biggest yet on an Android handset, a 3.2-megapixel camera and a TeleNav-powered GPS (more specs below).

The new device comes courtesy of Huawei, which had been rumored to be working with T-Mobile since displaying a device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year.

Nimbuzz has announced the launch of an Android application for it’s mobile social messaging service. The free app for Android comes after the updated iPhone 3.0 release in mid-July.

What does Nimbuzz do?

It’s a mobile messaging hub, combining a lot of different services in one application. Nimbuzz mainly focuses on Instant Messaging, geo-presence, and VoIP. Through the Nimbuzz “buddy list”, you can see if your friends are available to talk, what service they are available over, and where they are. It acts as a hub for quite a few existing services, including Skype, Google Talk, AIM, Facebook and MySpace.

Reuters reports that Android will hone in on business customers along with social networking and gaming fans in future versions of the smartphone operating system.

Google Vice President of Engineering Andy Rubin said he expects future versions of the OS to focus on enterprise features that would sync with Google apps like GMail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. On the social networking front, Rubin called Palm's Synergy contact management system, which pulls data from social networking sites like Facebook, "a step in the right direction." He explained that similar features would be available on Android in the future.

Google has announced their intention to make future versions of their Android mobile operating system more enterprise-friendly and fight harder to gain market share from competitors like the RIM (Research in Motion) Blackberry. Android has a long way to go to be an enterprise-class mobile platform, and Google isn't even heading in the right direction.

Andy Rubin, Google Vice President of Engineering, said that Google plans to build "enterprise features" into future versions of the Android OS including the ability to sync with Google apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. The problem with that strategy is that those are not enterprise applications, at least not yet. The ability to sync a mobile phone with Gmail is not a compelling feature for an enterprise.

A new social-networking mobile phone that uses Google software has been launched that integrates online-sharing sites Twitter and Facebook and Flickr.

'The Hero' is made by Taiwanese firm HTC and will go on sale next month.

It is operated using Android, which is the world’s first ‘open-source’ operating system for mobile devices.

Today has been exciting for mobile phone enthusiasts. First, information on the HTC Lancaster was released. Details about the Lancaster include a 2.8″ touchscreen, full size slide out QWERTY, and will feature a unique HTC Social Networking integration client. Launch date on ATT is slated for August 3rd.

Android, Android, Android. To say that beleaguered cellphone maker Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is pinning its hopes on the operating system would be an understatement. Today, after co-CEO and head of its mobile unit Sanjay Jha confirmed during its Q1 earnings call that Motorola was on course to launch Android-based smartphones in time for the fourth quarter holiday season, analysts grilled him in the question and answer session, wanting to know just how much Motorola can differentiate itself from its rivals while using Android, and if operators were biting. Here’s what Jha had to say

Still, Motorola undoubtedly is keeping an eye on North America, where smartphones sales are booming, racking up 69 percent growth in 2008. The introduction of new products in last year's fourth quarter, such as the RIM BlackBerry Storm and the Android-based T-Mobile G1, "helped smartphone sales grow to account for roughly 20 percent of total sales in the region," noted Gartner Principal Analyst Hughes De La Vergne.

LG has confirmed it will be bringing several Android mobiles to the UK market in 2009, and that it will play a big part in pushing mobile social networking.

Although the much expected slew of Android handsets never showed up at this year's Mobile World Congress, LG confirmed to TechRadar that 2009 will still be the year of Android for the company:

TotalMedia maker ArcSoft has now launched a multimedia turn-key solution for the Android platform. Named PowerMobia for Android, the package contains applications like Camera with advanced capture technologies, Media Gallery with social network connectivity, Photo Workshop to edit photos, Video Player and PC Converter to convert and playback media files, Streaming Video Player to playback online content, Video Editor, and more.

You can see The Sun / Express headline now: “Google Got Me Fired”…”Google Destroyed My Marriage”…”Google Abducted My Child”. The fact that any parties involved had to explicitly opt-in to the upgrade/download, had to sign in, had to turn Latitude on, had to add contacts, had to set their location sharing on - mere technicalities. No-one’s going to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

However it is this reaction and the great unwashed’s assumed agreement that will have MNO’s thinking twice. No-one will want to be the first to launch something that will be dubbed the ‘SpyPhone’. The fact that all MNO’s have - to one degree or another - relationships with Google, that a large majority of their devices support Latitude, and in some cases they actively pushed Google services to customers (T-Mobile) just adds to the apprehension. Some will be feeling a bit blindsided by this - word on the street is that no-one saw this coming so soon. Even product managers who meet up with Google reps on a near-daily basis were in the dark. This is a release worthy of Cupertino.

Vodafone, the largest mobile network operator in the world (doing business in more than 25 countries), announced they will exclusively launch the G2 (now called HTC Magic). Very good news in deed! According to Michael Bettiol, “An exclusive to Vodafone in Europe, the Magic is of debatable sexyness when compared to the T-Mobile G1 (and looks very Sony Ericsson, does it not?) and just happens to be one those phones that we’re just dying to know more about.

The Google G1 Android mobile phone can now connect to the Loopt services using a new application. The service features an alert function for friends, traffic delays and interactive maps.

Loopt Inc released its full mobile social network application for the Google G1 Android phone. The new application turns G1 mobile phones into a social networking hub. The service also supports numerous wireless providers

The Android version has all the standard Loopt features, including background location updating, which is used to send users alerts when there’s a friend nearby. Map mode and satellite view are available, and users can update their location info on services such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, as well as personal web sites and blogs.

Well, as we magically predicted the INQ¹ handset was unveiled by 3 today, touted as the ‘world’s most advanced social networking mobile phone’.

New-kid-on-the-block INQ brings the Web 2.0 experience to the mobile phone, with the INQ¹ offering one button access to user content filled sites like Windows Live Messenger, Facebook and social music platform Last.fm.

With instant messaging support and the ability to directly upload photos taken with its 3.2 megapixel camera, the INQ¹ finally gives Facebook addicts the chance to leave the house!

HTC is not the only manufacturer to create Android phones, because Motorola is reportedly working on a handset of its own that is powered by Google’s smartphone platform.

While the T-Mobile G1 seems to approach the messaging end of the equation with its QWERTY keyboard, the Motorola take on Android may have a slightly different focus.

From what we hear, Motorola wants its Android-based cell phone to serve as a mobile hub for all of your social networking needs. Dubbed the “new Android Social Networking SmartPhone”, this handset will presumably provide quick and easy access to such services as Twitter, Flickr, Wordpress blogs, Facebook, Digg, and so on.

A few weeks ago we found out that Motorola (NYSE: MOT) was looking to boost the number of people working on an Android phone. According to a new Motorola job posting, it is working on a “new Android Social Networking SmartPhone.” Cue dramatic music.

An eagle-eyed reader of The Android Guys blog spotted this job posting and saw fit to e-mail it on Over The Air’s favorite blog concerning all things Android. It reads:

It's no secret that Motorola's beefing up its Android staff in preparation to launch some actual hardware, but it is kinda interesting to hear them phrase it as a "social networking" device. In all likelihood, that's little more than a catchphrase for a hip-looking QWERTY device these days, but if that means they're funneling tens upon tens of people into the best mobile MySpace app the world has ever seen, we're going to lose our sanity.

The dominating SmartPhones in 2009 will be the ones that have a fast user friendly access to social networks, location services, and search.

The emergence of Android is unleashing this creativity with individual programmers as well corporations such as Motorola whereby they are already posting positions to develop an Android Social Networking SmartPhone - which a fellow AndroidGuy had discovered.