Brent Rose

Google's much-anticipated tablet operating system, Android 3.0 Honeycomb, made its splash in late February with the launch of the Motorola Xoom. Few Honeycomb-optimized apps were available at launch, but no matter: The expectation was that they'd follow soon after. Why wouldn't they, given the ever-growing popularity of Android? But instead of an explosion of Honeycomb apps, the fuse burned down to the powder keg...and then nothing happened. Four months later, we're still waiting: The number of Honeycomb-optimized apps remains in the low hundreds. By comparison, there are over 100,000 apps optimized for the iPad.

So, what gives? Is there something especially hard about optimizing an Android 2.x (Froyo, Gingerbread) app for Android 3.x (Honeycomb)? Are developers waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich (presumably, to be called Android 4.0), which will merge the tablet OS and phone OS into one? Is there just not enough demand? Are there problems with tablet app discovery in the Android Market? Is it just because Honeycomb is so new?

It must be hard for the Triumph, being announced alongside the dual-core beast that is the Motorola Photon 4G. That would give most phones an inferiority complex. But this is an Android for Virgin Mobile's pre-paid plans, though, so it belongs in another category all together.

The Triumph runs Android 2.2 without Motoblur.

This afternoon, Motorola and Sprint revealed the Photon 4G, the first of many Motorola Android phones headed to the carrier. The Photon 4G boasts a qHD display, an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor and 4G speeds. Pricing hasn't been announced, but the Photon 4G is due to Sprint sometime this summer.

Look and Feel

Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the most anticipated match in the history of smartphones for the heavyweight championship of the world. Are you ready? For those watching around the world, let's get ready to rumble!

For this battle, we're comparing the four heavyweights: Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and Windows Phone 7. Symbian is on the fast track to extinction, and WebOS (found on Palm and some HP devices) is a minor player.

Graphic: Diego AguirreIt sounds like a B-grade movie plot: Millions of smartphone owners are being tracked by their phones. Their mobile apps are eavesdropping on them, too. And information about their whereabouts is being sold to third parties.

But it isn't science fiction. If you own a smartphone and download popular apps, the odds are good that your smartphone knows more about your day-to-day travels than your spouse does. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are in the hot seat now, having to explain how iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 handsets really work, and what they know about where you go and what you do. Predictably, the lawsuits are flying.

The premise of Splode is simple: You have a screen filled with round fuzzy creatures (called Splodes) that you tap to--you guessed it--make them explode. Detonating one of these colorful little fur balls near another one produces a chain reaction, and these chain reactions are a key element of the game. You'll spend most of your time trying to create the biggest explosion possible.

Splode offers two game modes: Challenge Mode and Score Attack. In Challenge Mode, you must detonate a specific number of Splodes in each level. For example, you must try to blow up three of the five Splodes on the screen (with a single touch). If you succeed, you advance to the next level, where you must pop four out of seven, and so on. After a while, though, it gets a bit boring just tapping once, waiting for a long chain reaction, and then, repeating the process either on the same level or on the next one. The only things differentiating the levels are the total number of Splodes in each and the quantity of them that you need to explode.

First, let's go through the reasons you'd want the PlayBook. It's from the makers of BlackBerry, to start, and it's using the brand new QNX operating system, which is what RIM's future looks like.

It's fast, with a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM. The 7-inch screen looks quite good, sporting a resolution of 1024 x 600. It has a fast browser that supports Adobe Flash better than most. Plus, it has high-quality speakers, very good front and rear cameras, and the capability to play full 1080p HD video on a TV via its HDMI port.

Google announced three large updates for its Android for Business portfolio on Thursday. The updates focus on security and connecting with colleagues, and will be available to all customers of Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education.

RIM announced on Friday the launch of BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing, a free app designed to make scheduling and joining conference calls incredibly easy. If your company routinely (or even occasionally) relies on conference calls, I can see this quickly becoming an indispensible app.

The feature that most users will be the most excited about is One Click Join. When your calendar says it's time for a conference call to begin, you get a pop-up on your phone. Click a single button and you'll be dialed in, with no need to remember the dial-in number or the access code. The Mobile Conferencing app integrates deeply into BlackBerry's Calendar application, designed to make it easy to turn any meeting into a conference call without having to leave the Calendar app. You can also create recurring calls.