On the whole, the HTC One X is a fast, high-end handset and one we found works well, as it should do – with all that it has inside. We can’t fault many aspects of phone, other than the lack of foresight of the Ice Cream Sandwich features and possibly the lack of a microSD card slot, but there is 32GB of internal storage and 25GB of on-line Dropbox access.

Senior vice president of mobile at technology outfit Google, Andy Rubin, has announced that the total number of new Android devices activated each day amounts to almost 850,000.

Rubin also bragged the total number of activated Android handset all over the world has surpassed the 300 million mark.

“Each and every day, we are humbled by the trajectory of Android and our partners. With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250 per cent, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million,” Rubin stated, as per a report by The Inquirer.

No doubt, such an astounding sales figure is quite an achievement for the Mountain View based search giant, considering how arch rival Apple managed to sell 37.04 million units of its flagship iPhone in the last quarter alone (as per the company’s latest fiscal report), Google and the Android family’s journey in the smartphone is unlikely to be just a walk in the park in the days to come.

Despite repeated requests, Apple has refrained from revealing the net figure of iPhone it sold throughout all these years.

A new study carried out by the researchers at independent technology analysis organisation, Canalys, found that the mobile apps featured in Google’s Android Market are seen as overpriced, causing an upset balance within the virtual marketplace.

According to the Canalys report, the top paid applications in the Android Market are far more costly than the ones featured in Apple’s App Store. They went on to claim that such a costly structure of the Android Market is forcing Android users from across the world to pay as much as two-and-a-half times more than what their counterparts using an Apple device usually pay for paid-applications.

It further warned that the over-priced apps are not only affecting Android users, but developers too as unlike Apple users, the price factor could eventually force Android users to opt out of paid applications.

“That developers can apparently charge more for their apps on Android and make it into the top paid list is clearly a positive,” explained Canalys managing director for Mobile, Rachel Lashford, in a report by The Inquirer.

“But the reality is that with fewer people willing to purchase apps on Android than on iOS today, there is more of a necessity to do so,” he added.

The company claims that Ubuntu for Android provides users a full-fledged Ubuntu desktop experience which they can install in their handsets along with the existing default Android environment.

Canonical further stated that the new offering will enable users to run Ubuntu right from their phones when they plug-in the device to a dock which further connects it to a monitor and a keyboard. Apart from that, Ubuntu for Android will also be capable of using the host device’s data connectivity, including 3G and 4G networks.

“Carry just the phone, and connect it to any monitor to get a full Ubuntu desktop with all the native apps you want, running on the same device at the same time as Android. Magic,” Mark Shuttleworth- the founder of Canonical stated in a blog post.

“Everything important is shared across the desktop and the phone in real time,” he added.

It is worth noting here that the new offering is totally different from the Ubuntu mobile OS that Canonical is planning to dish out some time in 2014.

High Tech Computer (HTC), the Taiwanese phone maker, recently announced that the company’s profit dropped by 25.5 per cent, first ever in the company’s history. The mobile manufacturing giant released its financial data from last quarter of 2011 which showed that the net income after paying all due tax, stands at NT$11.02 billion.

During the same quarter a year ago the company made NT$14.8 billion. But, the company said that year-on-year growth from the month of January till November increased by 78.9 per cent with around NT$439.4 million earned as revenue.

The fall in profits of HTC can definitely be attributed to the fact that iPhone 4S stole the thunder in the last quarter of 2011 and there was very little that the Taiwanese phone maker was offering that could stand the competition of Apple.

Despite the fact that HTC was one of the early adopters of Android, Samsung managed to steal the thunder across the globe with its Galaxy range of smartphones.

Analysts believe that even though comparatively smaller players like Motorola and HTC did manage partnerships with Google, bigger players are taking away lion’s share of the smartphone market and the status quo is not going to change that quickly.

“HTC and RIM [Research In Motion Ltd] appear to be suffering from a market share shift to lower-end products and other vendors”, said Steven Pelayo, regional head of Asian-Pacific technology research at HSBC Securities reported Taipei Times.

After these disappointing results, the company tried to pacify the concerns of its investors. Perhaps during next week’s CES the company will be launching some new models to improve their market condition.

Google has posted ten more premium apps available for 10 cents from the Android Market on the 7th day of its 10 billion app downloads milestone celebrations.

The new apps include: Doodle Jump, When I Get Bigger, Beautiful Widgets, Flick Soccer!, SUPER KO BOXING! 2, Blow Up, Block Breaker 3 Unlimited HD, SoundHound, Flight Control and Roll in the Hole.

All of these premium apps are available for download at a special price of 10 cents. Three more days remain until the milestone celebrations close down.

Android Market, only a few years after its launch, has managed to surpass the 10 billion app downloads mark. At the time of the announcement, Google had said that users were downloading 1 billion apps from the Android Market.

Despite the popularity that Android and Android Market have enjoyed, there is a darker side to its success. Due to the open nature of the platform and the lack of a substantial app approval process, the platform has been targeted by malicious apps, developed by hackers looking to exploit its popularity.

The security on Android Market has become tighter over the past few months, but hackers are using third party Android app stores to spread malware.

Facebook is the most used app on the Android mobile operating system after the official Android Market app.

According to a report released by Nielsen, the official Facebook app for Android is the most used app for Android, even beating first-party Google apps to the top spot.

The market research firm released a list of most used apps by Android users belonging to different age categories, as reportedby ZDNet..

The Facebook for Android app was used by 80 percent of 18-24 year olds, 92 percent 25-34 year olds and 77 percent 35-44 year olds. The only app which beat Facebook was the Android Market application, according to Nielsen.

Facebook for Android beats the official Google Search, Gmail and Google Maps in terms of active usage by users. However, Google’s apps still manage to get heavy usage from users.

“Google’s YouTube app gets heavy usage from Android smartphone owners 18 -24: 64 percent have used it in the past 30 days, compared to 56 percent and 51 percent of 25-34 and 35-44 year olds,” Nielsen said.

“A preference for media apps with a social dimension (e.g. Words with Friends) among the 18-24 set is also reinforced by their sizable usage of music and video apps (e.g. Pandora) compared to older demographics,” the company added.

Apps posing as popular third-party software such as Angry Birds tricked users into sending premium text messages.

Unlike some other app services, Android Market apps are not vetted prior to being added to the store.

Google has said it swiftly removes apps that violate its security policies.

Lookout, a mobile security company based in San Francisco, believes the fraud attempt originated from Russia.

After notifying Google of the 22 affected apps, Lookout said it then identified five more apps running the so-called “RuFraud” scam.

The scam would make a user believe they were about to download a game or program, but instead they were giving the phone “permission” to send a text message costing about £3.

Google would not confirm whether these additional apps had also been deleted.

Lookout believes that there have been at least 14,000 downloads of apps containing RuFraud. Users across Europe were affected, including the UK.

The company said attacks of this nature have risen in the past few months.

More effort

Google has come under fire in the past for not doing enough to remove substandard or dangerous apps posing as popular software.

Rival stores, such as those from Microsoft and Apple, require all apps to go through a vetting process before being added.

Alternative app stores for Android have been created by companies such as Amazon, offering additional curation and more vigorous checks.

David Emm, a security researcher for Kaspersky, said Google needed to put in more effort to filter out harmful applications in their store.

“The flexibility of the Android Market is great, but that comes at a potential price to security.

“It will become a potentially bigger problem in the future. Android’s market share is going up, and so is the number of malware-infected mobile software.”

Mr Emm said Google might need third-party help to add screening functions for applications being added to the store.

“I think it’s a question of using existing desktop technologies and transferring them to mobile,” he said.

He worries that existing vulnerabilities in Android applications leaves the door open for wider breaches on Google’s network.

“The concern is that your Android Market account is attached to your Gmail account – which means if my Market account is hacked, it adds another security problem.”

Glass houses

Meanwhile Microsoft, whose Windows Phone is an Android competitor, has launched a competition offering a free smartphone to disgruntled Android users who tell their story.

Ben Rudolf, Microsoft’s “Windows Phone evangelist”, tweeted: “If you have #droidrage from Android malware, share your story with me and you could win a #windowsphone!”

The marketing ploy was dismissed by Graham Cluley, author of Sophos’ Naked Security blog.

“Microsoft would be wise not to look too smug at the current focus on Android malware issue though – and using the issue as a promotion for Windows Phone 7 may be shortsighted,” he wrote.

“Let’s not forget, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Naked Security later reported on an apparent vulnerability which allowed a Windows Phone’s messaging function to be disabled by simply receiving a text.

The video release will come as an embarrassment to Intel, which is continuing to push its low-power Atom processors as an alterative to ARM-based chips for OEMs and ODMs looking at producing Android-based devices.

While Android was originally developed for the ARM instruction set architecture, its open source nature – barring a hiccough with Android 3.0 ‘Honeycomb,’ which was not released under an open source licence due to concerns regarding ‘hacks’ put in place for temporary tablet support – means that it can be ported to almost any platform.

The x86 architecture is an obvious choice, allowing devices based on chips from the likes of Intel, AMD and VIA to run the operating system, but other companies are getting involved too with MIPS the latest to announce an Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ build for its architecture.

The video, released by the Android-x86 team with the help of AMD, shows an MSI WindPad 110W running an Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ build on its AMD Brazos-based accelerated processing unit (APU).

The performance in the video is smooth, thanks to full hardware acceleration support provided by AMD, although doesn’t quite live up to what has been seen of Android 4.0 on the Asus Transformer Prime, which packs a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 ‘Kal-El’ ARM-based processor.

The video is reproduced here.