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He predicted that by this date, developers would be making their apps for Android first. And that’s simply not happening. Sure, there are a few here and there that do it. But for the most part, the situation remains the same. In the hearts and minds of top app developers, it’s iOS first and Android second — or not at all.

The same is true for the vast majority of new startups — I talk with dozens each week. The refrain: iOS first. Android second. Down the road. At some point. Maybe.

So why was Schmidt so wrong? In my mind, there are a number of reasons — the same ones I went into in my initial post. The ability to make money is the most important. But the most interesting reason again ties into something Schmidt said back in December:

“With the ICS release our core objective as a company is to get all of the hardware vendors onto that platform.”

I mean, he really said that. And it’s unbelievable because it’s perhaps the most epic fail in the history of epic fails. Google’s “core objective as a company” was to get hardware vendors onto Ice Cream Sandwich (aka Android 4.0), and as of June 1 — seven months after the launch of the OS — 7.1 percent of Android phones are actually on it. Seven. Point. One. Percent.

That number isn’t from some bullshit survey of a few hundred devices or some propaganda from Apple — it’s the number published by Google itself. And it’s pathetic.

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Perhaps no review has ever painted a better picture of the problem with “unbiased” reviews of technology than David Pogue’s review of the Samsung Galaxy Player 4.2, the iPod touch of Android. There’ve been a lot of reviews in a lot of publications that don’t help anybody buy anything — the very thing they’re supposed to do! — but this review is amazing in how wildly successful it is as saying absolutely nothing useful about the product at hand.

Pogue, ostensibly to please a vocal, angry contingency of fanboys, bends over backwards so hard to say nice things about the Galaxy Player 4.2 that he practically begins to eat himself, so that every good thing he says about it is immediately negated in the same thought. The screen is fantastic, except for when you open your eyes.

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So let me get this straight. Advertising networks that track user behavior are OK with “Do Not Track” only so long as a single-digit percentage of users have it turned on? But if a lot of people start using it they’re out? Not being able to track users across the web is a “nightmare” for ad networks?

Years ago I had the idea that if Microsoft really wanted to destroy Google, they should have released a version of IE with a built-in on-by-default ad-blocker that included Google ads in its blacklist.

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Feast your eyes on this! Oracle’s Java APIs, specifically as used by Google, are not copyrightable. “Therefore, Oracle’s claim based on Google’s copying of the 37 API packages, including their structure, sequence and organization is DISMISSED,” the judge writes.

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Over a week after it began deliberations, the jury has returned a verdict in the patent infringement case between Oracle and Google, finding that the search giant did not infringe upon Oracle’s patents with Android. In play were infringement counts on eight different claims across two separate patents: RE38,104 and 6,061,520. Given the decision, there will be no need for a damages phase in connection with the patent claims, and with the recent agreement by Google and Oracle to postpone any damages hearings related to copyright infringement, the jury has now been dismissed from the proceedings altogether. Judge William Alsup thanked the jurors for their hard work before they left the courtroom, noting that “this is the longest trial, civil trial, I’ve ever been in.”

It’s the final victory in several trial coups for Google. While the jury did find that Android infringed Oracle copyrights by its use of the the structure, sequence, and organization of 37 Java APIs, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on whether it was covered under fair use, rendering the verdict moot for the moment. The jury found that Google had infringed on only one other copyright count — the use of nine lines of rangeCheck code — though Judge Alsup later ruled that Google had also infringed by its use of eight Java test files in Android, adding a second minor infringement count to Google’s plate.

“It’s the final victory in several coups for Google”

While the jury’s involvement has come to an end, there are still several outstanding questions. Judge Alsup has yet to rule on whether the SSO of the Java APIs can be copyrighted in the first place; the jury was asked to come to their findings under the assumption that it was.

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Celebrating the memory of beloved synth pioneer Bob Moog and commemorating his birthday, Google’s home page (currently in Australia, live in the US tomorrow) is a fully working, multi-trackable Moog synthesizer. Share your masterpiece!

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A federal appeals court has refused to force the US National Security Agency to explain any involvement it has had with Web giant Google, citing that a revelation could threaten the entire United States government.

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Apple shipped iOS 5.1.1 yesterday. iPhone 3GSs bought in June 2009 are eligible to upgrade to iOS 5.1.1 today. How many Android phones from 2009 are running an even vaguely up to date OS? None.

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It’s quite clear that Android was being designed to a completely different target before the iPhone was released. What we see here would have fitted in perfectly with the world of Symbian and BlackBerry. This early build of Android is in fact even less capable and mature than the 2004 release of Symbian Series 90 (Hildon), the OS that runs on the Nokia 7700 and 7710 – Nokia’s first, and only, pre-iPhone touchscreen smartphones. It’s not hard to see that iPhone really changed the thinking across the entire industry, and caused everybody to start from scratch. Android, webOS, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8, BlackBerry 10 – all of these exist because of the iPhone, and standing on its shoulders they have made some amazing and unique contributions to the ecosystem.

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I’d say it seems pretty clear HTC is now listening to a different set of “customers”.

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It isn’t as elegant of a solution as we might as hoped, but at least it’s free.

Yeah, who wouldn’t want a free dongle that reboots your tablet every few minutes?

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Google’s transition into the new Microsoft is now complete: fancy-pants sci-fi concept video to promote stunningly awkward augmented reality glasses.

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Among its findings, the analysis shows a significantly higher percentage of iPhones than Android phones connecting to the Internet via Wi-Fi networks.

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The four most popular camera phones on Flickr currently? The iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS — in that order.

With app sales it’s the same, iOS sells an order of magnitude more apps than Android.

Yet Android has the higher market share in the US.

My guess is most Android users get their phone on recommendation from the carrier or sales people, and they use it the same way they used their previous non-smart phone: to make calls and little else.

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And check out their Really Advanced Search options…

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Apple has launched a new patent assault on its competitors, one that appears to unleash the nukes that Steve Jobs reportedly told his biographer Walter Isaacson he was going to drop on Google’s Android.

“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product,” the late Apple cofounder told the author of the überpopular authorized biography Steve Jobs in a 2010 interview. “I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

[..]

The patent being asserted by Sewell and his crew is USPTO Patent #1,042,012, first granted to the American Mathematical Society in October 1912, subsequently renewed, then acquired by Apple at an unknown date.

The first entry among the patent’s Claims describes “A quadrilateral having all four interior angles of 90°, opposite sides that are parallel, and congruent diagonals that bisect each other.”

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A federal judge has ruled that Asus’ Transformer Prime tablet does not infringe on Hasbro’s Transformers trademark, in spite of the suit actually making sense. Just “Transformer”, or just “Prime”, might have flown right by Hasbro’s lawyers without a second look — those are words, after all — but putting the two together seemed like tempting fate. As expected, Hasbro took Asus to task in December.

But the judge has initially sided with Asus, saying that people were unlikely to confuse the tablet with Hasbro properties, noting they had also waited too long to file the suit.

As a little kicker on the story, court filings have revealed that the device has produced pre-order numbers that are, shall we say, less than legendary.

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So when court filings reveal that pre-orders for this poster child for Android 4 tablets (and it does look great) total a whopping 2,000 units as of a month ago, it’s kind of a letdown.

That looks quite a lot, compared to the iPad 3 sales…

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Here’s a simple rule: if your product isn’t a condom then don’t name it like one. What am I talking about? Let’s take a look…

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The latest outing of Angry Birds – this time in spaaaace – has been downloaded 10 million times since it launched three days ago. The catapult-pinging galactic avian game was unveiled amid huge publicity on Friday. Rovio announced the expectation-smashing numbers on its Twitter feed this morning.

No wonder console builders are worried by iOS and Android.

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So Google wrote to my zeldman.com address, which they won’t allow me to associate with my Google+ address, to invite me to start a Google+ account (which I already have) on my zeldman.com account, which they won’t support. And if I do that (which I can’t), and some other complicated stuff, they promise that I will then be able to participate in Google IO, whatever that is.

And now they have written to warn me that my Google IO, whatever it is, will stop being offered if I don’t sign up (which I can’t) right away. And they even convinced you, my friend, to send a personal note ensuring that I don’t miss the opportunity to sign up for their unspecified product or service with the account they don’t support before the unexplained offer is terminated.

While I should be curious about Google IO and what I will miss if I fail to take advantage of the cumbersome offer, what I’m actually far more curious about is how an organization that can’t write an effective direct marketing email message has managed to become one of the most powerful corporations of the 21st century.

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Thanks heavens it’s only for photo-tagging: Apple has tossed yet another gauntlet onto the ground in its ongoing spat with Google, dropping Google Maps out of iPhoto for iOS and opting for OpenStreetMap instead.

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So when I finally got to try out Adobe Photoshop Touch, I was intrigued to see what Adobe had accomplished. After a couple of hours playing around in the app (it accidentally went live yesterday, then Adobe pulled it) I’ve come away very impressed with what Adobe has accomplished. Photoshop Touch is a powerful and capable version of Photoshop for the iPad, without a doubt. To me, it is the latest iPad app that has demonstrated that the iPad is for more than “content consumption” — that’s just an old myth now.

Also available for Android.

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What’s next? Perhaps throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.

That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

“It will look very strange to onlookers when people are wearing these glasses,” said William Brinkman, graduate director of the computer science and software engineering department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “You obviously won’t see what they can from the behind the glasses. As a result, you will see bizarre body language as people duck or dodge around virtual things.”

Okay, time for some pictures. Here’s the prototype:

And here’s a screenshot for the product in action:

And here’s a leaked photo of the Samsung Galaxy Goggles

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You probably take for granted that you can view videos on your smartphone, tablet, PC, or DVD/Blu-ray player and connect to the Internet without being tied to a cable. That works because the industry came together years ago to define common technical standards that every firm can use to build compatible products for video and Wi-Fi. Motorola and all the other firms that contributed to these standards also made a promise to one another: that if they had any patents essential to the standards, they would make their patents available on fair and reasonable terms, and would not use them to block competitors from shipping their products.

Motorola has broken its promise. Motorola is on a path to use standard essential patents to kill video on the Web, and Google as its new owner doesn’t seem to be willing to change course.

Microsoft telling Google to not be evil.

I surely must have stepped through the looking glass…

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At Priceonomics, we firmly believe that resale value is the best objective indicator of product quality. If you wanted to figure out the best cell phone, you could look at all the reviews, test out all the phones, talk to all the experts, but still your assessment will be subjective. Or you could let the market tell you which phones are the highest quality by seeing which ones best retain their value over time.

Priceonomics phone pricing data strongly indicates that Apple phones are a better value than smartphones on other platforms. The market has spoken, and Android and Blackberrys do not age well.

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“Our firm’s reputation for providing quality service reflects the high standards we demand of ourselves. Our high standards, responsive service and specialized staff spell the difference between our firm and the rest.”