Samsung Electronics, maker of the Galaxy mobile phone, may have surpassed Nokia and Apple in smartphone sales for the first time on demand for devices that run on Android software, a research company said.

Shares of Taiwan's HTC are up more than 15% this year as the company cashes in on Android. Investors might be wise to seek out international funds that own the stock.

IDC expects Android, which passed Symbian as the leading operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2010, to grow to more than 40% of the market in the second half of 2011.

HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou took the stage at Qualcomm's Uplinq conference in Sad Diego today to talk about Android and Windows Phone 7, but not before tooting HTC's own horn.

HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson drove Android shipments in the first quarter, with each vendor shipping well over three million devices, said Canalys Principal Analyst Pete Cunningham.

Future versions of Motorola's Atrix smartphone-laptop combo will be rolled out as Android "alternatives" to tablets and other newfangled devices, Motorola's chief executive said this week.

Verizon Wireless will start selling the HTC's Droid Incredible 2 on April 28 while Sprint will put the Nexus S 4G from Google on sale May 8. Both smartphones will sell for US$199.99 with two year service agreements.

NHN and Daum Communications, operators of South Korea's two largest Internet search sites, said in statements they filed complaints against Google with the country's Fair Trade Commission for blocking local phone carriers and manufacturers from embedding their search applications in devices using the Android operating system.

Rumors, misinformation and speculation are spreading like wildfire across the industry today following recent reports about Android anti-fragmentation efforts and what this means for processor architecture openness. Will Google's anti-fragmentation initiatives for Android code impact providers of microprocessor architectures such as MIPS, Intel and ARM? Does anti-fragmentation mean that Google is standardizing Android for any specific architecture?

iPhone and Android are already flooding past corporate gate keepers, and current BlackBerry users are looking to make the leap to these newer devices. Recent Nielsen surveys show that BlackBerry users covet iPhones and Androids. These new devices are the most desired smartphones for every demographic group that Nielsen studied.

Google has closed availability of the source code to Android 3.0 Honeycomb, explaining that the tablet-oriented software was not ready for use on smartphones and that the company didn't want outside developers or enthusiasts experimenting with it in unauthorized ways.

Motorola Mobility, which has been Google's only major licensee fully committed to Android, is now developing a new web-based OS intended to give it more control over its future, enraging Android advocates anew just weeks after Nokia opted for WP7 platform

But the app selling experience, especially for MLB and other premium publishers, is still much better at Apple's iOS App Store than Google's Android Market.

The Motorola Droid Pro is a fair approximation of a BlackBerry handset, minus the inferior keyboard and the fact that it doesn't come close to matching Research In Motion's security measures.

"We would've loved if they would have chosen Android; they chose the other guys," Schmidt said during a keynote presentation here at Mobile World Congress. "I think we were pretty straightforward. We would like them to adopt Android at some point in the future; that offer remains open."

"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable," said CEO Steven Elop in an internal email.

it's being said that the first Facebook phones will be built by HTC, just like how the first Android phones were made by HTC...the HTC-sourced smartphones will "run a modified build of Google's Android operating system that will display information from a user's Facebook account on the home screen." So, it's like HTC Sense or Samsung TouchWiz... only with Walls, Pokes, and FarmVilles.