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-Requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps;

Android versions since KitKat have shipped without a browser at all, just WebView. It's up to OEMs which browser they want to install.

REF: Android 4.4+ KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome or build their own

[citation needed]

Lots of people have pointed that out. For example:

http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/10/09/why-is-samsung-the-only-android-success-story/

Sorry, an article from appleinsider.com full of quotes from Tim Cook (and only Tim Cook, not a single outside analyst) doesn't hold much merit. It's marketing, not fact or news.

As for your other "source", it doesn't support your claims at all.

> Coulling believes that tablets will continue to pressure PC and notebook sales "in the short term,"

How exactly does an analyst predicting short term pressure on the PC market translate into the iPad eliminating the PC market? Where do you people come up with this crap?

Also interesting that both of your sources are from 10 months ago. Maybe that's because more recent numbers show a decline in iPad sales?

http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/10/26/apple-reports-q3-2012-results-iphone-sales-up-ipad-sales-down/

"Microsoft must be getting rather frustrated with the Nokia partnership and its inability to break through in smartphones."

http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/10/01/microsoft-is-working-on-its-own-branded-wp8-device-windows-phone-surface-to-launch-in-h1-next-year/

They are not suing Amazon for the fire, or Google for the Nexus line....

They did sue over Nexus (and not just once). They just sue Samsung over it rather than Google, because Samsung is the hardware manufacturer. But all patents invoked so far are software patents (swipe to unlock, overscroll), so in reality they are suing over stock Android functionality that Google wrote, not Samsung's additions.

Or because Motorola threaten to sue other Android manufacturers.....

http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/11/motorolas-sanjay-jha-openly-admits-they-plan-to-collect-ip-royalties-from-other-android-makers/

Those are Windows 8 tablets (x86) not Windows RT (ARM). Microsoft is only allowing the aforementioned manufacturers to produce Windows RT tablets until January.

Source: http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/07/24/asus-lenovo-toshiba-samsung-to-launch-windows-rt-tablets-this-year-others-await-microsofts-permission-in-january/

Seems like sour grapes to me. Microsoft picked Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba, and Samsung to launch Windows RT tablets (they also picked HP, but HP declined, and decided to focus on x86 tablets instead). Acer is not on that list, so these words are no surprise. You don't hear any of those companies selected speaking out against the Surface.

Source: http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/07/24/asus-lenovo-toshiba-samsung-to-launch-windows-rt-tablets-this-year-others-await-microsofts-permission-in-january/

Are you sure it was (just) about Apple?

Maybe it was because Motorola was talking about suing other Android manufacturers and collect royalties?
http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/11/motorolas-sanjay-jha-openly-admits-they-plan-to-collect-ip-royalties-from-other-android-makers/

The patents involved in Microsoft vs Motorola have been known since October of... get this.... 2010

But lets not let facts get in the way of your FUD. I just invalidated every single ignorant thought that you decided to dump on us.

LG Prada [wikipedia.org] Try again. Apple wasn't the first, and the only thing that makes them "trying to look like the iPhone" is the focus on a large touch screen rather than tons of buttons. Seems the entire "Apple transformed the market" is the straw man.

The LG Prada makes my point very well because the LG Prada was not a big success, despite being made by a well-known factory and having a famous design imprint. Hardly anybody in the US has used it, because no US carrier even bothered to offer it. Clearly, it takes more than just a touchscreen to transform the market for phones. What Apple offered was a touchscreen paired with software that fully exploited the capabilities of a touchscreen. The LG Prada, on the other hand, just used the touchscreen to imitate an older phone design. For example, if you wanted to enter text, there was no QWERTY keyboard--you had to do it with multiple button presses on a numeric keypad. Essentially, what the LG Prada did was use the touchscreen to emulate older phone designs. Hardly surprising that nobody was much interested in it. It turned out that coming up with a usable touch-based phone was not as easy as it now might seem in hindsight. Modern smartphones do not merely imitate the iPhone in appearance, they also emulate in in software design--another one of those things that seems obvious once somebody else is brilliant enough to come up with it. Here is a comment from Andrew Munn, who worked on the Android development team.

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritise UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.

It was only after iPhone that Android scrambled to imitate the iPhone's software and hardware design

Before the release of the iPad tablet PCs never got the type of market penetration that it did, mostly due to the lack of good user friendly software. Tablet PCs were developed more with the Geeks and enthusiasts in mind so the average person couldn't figure out how to easily use it. With the creation of the iPad, Apple was riding its own coattails to success. It was marketed, essentially, as an iPhone with a bigger screen. They capitalized on the iOS software that scaled well and chose the size well, probably after some good R&D. However, the form-factor concept of a flat, rectangular screen, with bezels on the side is nothing new. Tablet PCs before the iPad did it just as well. The iPad's name is reportedly a homage to the Star Trek PADD, which looks extremely similar to the iPad. As I said, the concept of a flat, rectangular, bezeled device is nothing new at all. There's nothing novel about it.The software running on it that takes advantage of the form factor and makes it as useful and easy to use, that is novel.

Exactly. There is more to a successful touch phone or pad than just the form factor. What transformed the market was Apple's felicitous combination of a particular hardware design with software designed and optimized to take adva

Just because macrumors made a mistake, doesn't mean you can use that mistake as your "evidence".

Macrumors wrote iOS when they meant iPhones.

If you are comparing Android the operating system, please compare it to iOS the operating system.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-15/tech/29997318_1_ios-android-google says 130 mil devices in July 2011
http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/06/06/apple-ios-stats-200-million-devices-sold-25-million-ipads-14-billion-apps-downloaded-and-more/ says 200 mil devices in Jun 2011

Can you teach me how 130:200 can be turned into 3:1 ?

Thank you very much.

I don't mean at Fry's. I mean, in use. Not at a tech conference, but among the typical, everday, consumer.

I've never seen a 7" Galaxy Tab.

As of June, Apple has supposedly sold 25M iPads. 1M Tabs? That means for every 25 iPads I saw "in the wild", I'd expect to see at least 1 tab.

For fun sake, let's assume they sold 25,000. That means I'd at least see 1 for every 1000 iPads. I know I've seen at least 1000 iPads - probably 2-3 times that means. Not a single 7" Tab. (I've seen one 10", and I've seen one Xoom, but that was because it was at a programmer user group meeting, and Xooms were given away at Adobe's conference last year.)

Few people seem to be discussing this, but just this month, Motorola's CEO was publicly threatening to wage patent warfare on other Android vendors. That would have been during the time they were under negotiation with Google, so I believe Motorola strong-armed Google into buying them outright for $12 billion rather than simply entering into a patent license agreement, by threatening to cause an Android civil war.

Some people were acting like buying Motorola was some great power play, but it was really an act of desperation that cost Google two years' worth of revenue.

Samsung and Asus now look like the biggest threats to Apple, in phones and tablets respectively.

"Apple will never unleash mass market versions of their products, Linux has and will."

1999 called, they want their quote back.

Ever heard of the iPod? iPhone? iPad? I think those are all mass market versions. How's the Linux mp3 player doing? Or Linux tablets? Even Android phones are just barely competing with iPhones despite having being offered by every carrier and having dozens of models and being free.

Android loves to say "Look, we're beating the iPhone!" but how hard is that when you pay people to take your product? I could beat Walmart's sales in no time if I was paying people $25 to take a new LCD and underwear.

LOL... hold on....

This article shows that in Europe alone, Android shipped 7.9 million units in the last quarter of 2010. You know, as in just a few months ago. It grew by an amazing 1,580% in that market year-to-year. In all of 2010, Symbian took #1, Android #2, then RIM and Apple respectively. Although note that in Q4, Android did overtake Symbian as well.

Wecome back to reality.

Oh, sales per device per quarter? Does it really matter? It's not Google's fault that Apple decided to close themselves off so much. Comparing device-to-device when talking about Apple vs. Google is like talking apples to oranges. It'd be more accurate to compare manufacturer sales at that point, in which case RIM is still leading Apple (among others, but they're more alike). I've always said that Apple is their own worst enemy sometimes, because they have so much potential just to stampede everyone over and keep it that way, but they continue to opt for a closed-everything market with all their products tying into themselves almost exclusively.

Speaking towards the future, Samsung is expecting to sell 50 million smart phones in 2011, and gleaning from some quick info that they expect approx. 20 million of those to be running Bada, which still leaves 30 million for Android since they'll mostly all be running one or the other. I don't know how much Apple expects to grow by that time, but assuming Samsung gets close to that number and Apple sees significant growth, at the very least they would be very close to compare on a per-manufacturer basis with a single OS. I'm kind of skeptical that Samsung will see that many smart phone sales, but I guess that's based off of the trend of going from dumb phones to smart phones, and since they already dominate the market with that, I think they're counting on upgrades bumping up that smart phone number. I guess we'll see what happens.

Here's a picture from TFA. Bottom right corner shows Amsterdam. And if you happen to find yourself in Amsterdam in need of such an app (i.e., you're probably not local), you think ya might want to do something more than dine, lodge, shop, sight see or drink?

I mean, we all know that the iPhone is not the phone for porn, but no "coffee shops" either? Geez Steve...far cry from your Reed college days, eh?

Why on earth won't it support multitasking when the previous versions have done so quite well? That's like asking whether Windows 7 will support these newfangled things called mice. Multitasking is not even a feature to ask about unless you're coming from the Apple camp.

That sounds completely reasonable, until you google "windows mobile 7 multitasking".
Here's what I got: one, two, three. That last one is official.

MS is attempting to get into the market by doing what they used to do best: Cloning. This means get every last bit of detail into their version of the product, *including* the drawbacks. They can fix this in later versions, and in the meantime they can say "what? it's not like the competition supports it...". This industry is absurd.

But I want my yoctobook! It would go so well with my cell phone and my projector.

-- White Goodman

... we have to go trough the whole miniaturization race again, that already happened with phones.

Remember when phones got smaller, and smaller, and lighter, and lighter.
Until people were unable to use them anymore.
It was even parodied. For example in the movie "Dodgeball", where a main character owned a phone that was roughly this size: http://www.unwiredview.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/mds-mobile-projector.jpg

Then the phones got bigger again. Even bigger PDAs came out. Etc.

A full qwertz keyboard only makes sense, if the keys are at least as wide, as the distance between your fingers. And then still, it's a real pain to type on them, unless the halves are split by an angle, and positioned correctly.

Luckily, I'm working on a nice thing, that might end the need for keyboards. (No, I can't give you details. Cry me a river. :P)

You know, There's just such a gadget. iNipple: http://www.unwiredview.com/2007/04/04/crazy-ipod-a ccessory-an-ipod-bra/

This is what worries me about the recent patent I read about on some other sites. The patent deal with connecting devices throughout the home and allowing content to be displayed or run on any device from a central point. This is basically Sony's strategy with the PS3/PSP connectivity, remote play and LocationFree.

Link

With the new UMA (Unlicensed Wireless Access) phones (Nokia 6136, Motorola A910) the move to wireless VoIP is inevitable. If you have a mobile phone that can switch seamlessly to Wi-fi when available, the game is over. You only need GSM or CDMA service as a backup option when there's no Wi-Fi and for call forwarding so people can reach you. All other things you can do over Wi-Fi connection. You just have to have VoIP client sitting in your mobile phone. If you already have free Wi-Fi in the office and at home, public Wi-Fi network around the city, that's all you need 90% of the time. As for Microsoft entrance it is good news, but nothing that important. There are a lot of good VoIP services that can readily be ported to Pocket PC, Symbian or Java and run on any mobile phone. If you can do it with Office great. But the same can be said for Skype, Gtalk and others. http://www.unwiredview.com/2006/02/20/nokia-6136-m otorola-a910-cell-phones-uma/