Flash coming to Android courtesy of BSQUARE

                       

The fine folks at BSQUARE have announced that they’ll be porting Adobe Flash to Google’s Android on behalf of a “global Tier 1 carrier.” Whether or not that implies this “global Tier 1 carrier” will have exclusive access to Flash out of the gate remains to be seen. Details are otherwise very scarce, and it’s unclear how this relates to the demo of Flash Andy Rubin showed off at Adobe MAX last year. However, BSQUARE bought NEC’s Adobe® Flash® Technology Consulting and Distribution business 12 months ago, and has done Android work for other customers, so the expertise should certainly be there — and naturally we wouldn’t expect them to go shouting about this if they didn’t have Adobe and Google’s blessing in one form or another.

Google Mobile App for BlackBerry Allows Search by Voice, My Location

     

Google Mobile App for BlackBerry now allows users to search using their voices and with Google’s My Location application. Google has been making substantial inroads with its mobile apps, even as a number of mobile device makers gear up to produce Android-based smartphones.

 

Google Mobile App for BlackBerry now allows users to reduce typing on the Research In Motion smartphones by carrying out mobile Web searches for a location using their voices or the search giant’s My Location application, or both.

Sony Ericsson 2010 Phones, Not the Leaked Roadmap Sadly

We wish we could have shown you the Sony Ericsson 2010 leaked phone roadmap, but all we’ve got are a couple of handsets created by the skilled Esato user tob!s. I’m talking about MU 2, T802, G909 and XPERIA X3, the latter being shown on our site a while ago.

Below there’s MU 2, one of the designer’s favorite phone and a pretty hot multimedia device, packing a pretty big touchscreen and hopefully Android OS. T802 features a pretty odd keypad and design, while G909 is something we’ve seen before, but XPERIA X3 is definitely the star of this bunch.

Android leads Linux mobile sales higher

                  

Google’s Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008. This was despite a general slowdown in growth for the entire smartphone sector over the same period.

Gartner estimates that HTC’s G1 Android-based mobile smartphone accounted for as much as 20% of Linux sales during the quarter. All told, Linux-on-mobile sales climbed 19.5 percent during the quarter when compared with the corresponding 2007 quarter.

Comparing 2008 with 2007, however, the picture is not as rosy. Linux-based smartphone sales in 2008 were down 4.2 percent over 2007 sales. Sales of Apple’s iPhone in 2008 were a massive 245.7 percent higher than in 2007 and Research in Motion’s Blackberry devices increased sales by 96.7 percent.

At the top of the operating system pile Symbian remained dominant, accounting for 52.4 percent of the smartphone market in 2008. This was, however, down 6.1 percent over 2007 as Symbian also lost ground to Apple’s Mac OS X and RIM. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile managed to increase its sales by 12.2 percent when comparing 2007 and 2008.