With the DROID, the company has perhaps created its most attractive and intriguing piece of technology yet.

The DROID is an odd and beautiful device.

Throughout our tests, we were consistently impressed with the tightness and speed of navigation on the phone. The DROID makes Android feel modern the way the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre are -- like machines designed for a pace of life that's increasingly more Twitter and less USPS.

In this article we ‘ll review the present state of the market, the key App Store building blocks and where will the market be heading in two years.

And while technical openness was established 7 years ago, what was lacking all these years was commercial openness; the funnel between external developers and in-market handsets was so thin that very few software players could pass through. It took Symbian six years to reach 10,000 applications, while it took Apple only 6 months (see our earlier analysis). In the first year of operation, Apple’s App Store brought in 65,000+ apps, 100,000 registered developers, 1.5Billion application downloads and availability to consumers across 77 countries through 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold.

n this historical context, it is easy to see that App Stores are a developer-to-consumer merchandising channel; a go-to-market vehicle for allowing consumers to distribute and retail their applications directly to the end-consumers, while taking out the middlemen from distribution and retailing.

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights page.

Basics Of Social Media Roi

n fact, 84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs.

ShopSavvy on iPhone...

“Every Google phone works differently, and you have fragmentation,” he said. And indeed that is a common worry among developers who don’t want their applications to be incompatible with certain phones that have unusual screen sizes or features. But then again, Windows Mobile, which has been around for nearly 10 years, already has that same problem, and one of Microsoft’s chief goals in upcoming versions is to rein in the variations between Windows Mobile handsets.

“You will see a speedy set of innovation for us in the next 6, 12, 24 months,” said Robert J. Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division at a news media event in New York to introduce a quick revision of the operating system called Windows Mobile 6.5. “Should we have picked up on the trends a little sooner? It’s hard not to say we should have,” he added.

The app will be able to scan barcodes and deliver a summary of the ingredients in a food item, along with when it was manufactured. That data is usually on the food label, but Breadcrumbs goes a step further - it can provide extra information such as product recall data. If a product has been recalled in the past, this app will tell the consumer all of the relevant details.

according to reports  from two Silicon Valley startups, Flurry and AdMob. Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile metrics company, today said that it had seen an unprecedented 94 percent increase in the number of projects started by Android developers between September and October. 

So over 10% of the world’s professionals are already on LinkedIn. And with the social network now signing up a new member every second of every hour of every day, it shouldn’t be too long before the other 90% of the world’s business professionals eventually wind up in the LinkedIn universe.

Motorola Droid makes an official appearance on Moto’s U.S. site. It just might be that we were sent this direct link which isn’t mean to be public, but… you know how that’s going to work out. In any case, the Motorola Droid, which we have torn limb from limb (check for our preview tomorrow) is indeed a bad ass mama jama, but if you don’t want to wait for our preview, hit the jump for some screenshots!

The number of people who use social networks from their smartphones skyrocketed 187%, to 18.3 million unique users, in July, compared with the same month a year earlier, says Nielsen. Social networking is among the fastest-growing activities on mobile devices, along with search and checking news, says Jon Stewart, Nielsen's research director for technology and search.

About 65 million of Facebook's 300 million members are mobile users. Eight months ago, it was 20 million. Of MySpace's estimated 125 million members worldwide, about 25 million use mobile devices. A year ago, it was 6 million.

With an Apple® iPhone™, iPod Touch® or any other web-enabled mobile device, MobilEdu users can navigate campus/school maps and course catalogs, get real-time updates on sports teams and special events and even e-mail instructors and classmates. Branded uniquely for each institution, MobilEdu can be accessed by users who download their institution’s iPhone application from the Apple AppStore to their iPhone, iPod touch, or by using any mobile web browser.

Locast is an innovative platform for sharing and discovering location- based user-generated videos and production quality multimedia content provided by RAI New Media.