Gallery Information

Google said on Tuesday that every day around 400 thousand of Google Android-based devices are activated and that so far around 100 million Android-powered products have been sold to date. The company also indicated that from now on it would attempt to ensure that one version of operating system is installed across all eco-system.

Google Android emerged first in late 2008 and in less than three years time it became the No. 1 mobile operating system. The popularity of Android was conditioned by the fact that manufacturers of mobile phones could customize it and several different versions of the OS were available. However, with multiple flavours of Android on hundreds of phones, user experience of the platform is rather unpredictable, moreover, software designers have to ensure that their applications work on all recent releases. With the 100 millionth Google Android operating system activated, Google wants to change that.

Over the past two and a half years, Google has shipped eight releases of Android and there are now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes. This week Google talked about its next version of Android code-named Ice Cream Sandwich. The company's goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device.

In a bid to further strengthen its smartphone and communication businesses, Microsoft Corp. reportedly wants to acquire Nokia Corp., the world's largest supplier of smartphones that recently decided to use Windows Phone operating system as the main OS for smartphones. The negotiations about the transaction will start next week, according to an analyst.

"Next week Nokia will begins talks with Microsoft in a bid to sell its phone division. While the results of these negotiations will not be public, the deal could be closed before the end of 2011 as both companies in a hurry. After all, today the main task for the current management of Nokia is not to produce good products, but to destroy the company as soon as possible and transfer interesting asses to Microsoft. Everything is transparent and takes place in public," said Eldar Murtazin, an analyst with Mobile-Review web-site.

The information is strictly unofficial at this point. Moreover, given the fact that Nokia's phones are not popular in the U.S., whereas Microsoft Windows Phone platform is not popular in Europe, practical feasibility of the deal is under a huge question mark.

Even though Microsoft has been developing operating systems for mobile phones for over a decade, its latest Windows Phone 7 operating system has failed to become popular among smartphone makers. Purchase of Nokia will help Microsoft to boost its presence on smartphones, but the company will not be able to gain control of 30% of the smartphone market that Nokia controls nowadays. It is also unlikely that Nokia will be able to boost its market share to historical levels.

Chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp. said that the company's next-generation Windows operating system would be released in 2012, which is ahead of publicly known schedule, which is officially kept confidential.

"We are obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows. [...] Yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there is a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors,: said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, during his keynote at Microsoft Developer Forum in Tokyo, Japan.

The comment made by the chief exec of Microsoft once again shows that the release schedule of Windows 8 is hardly set on stone. The world's largest software designer clearly needs an operating system for tablets as soon as possible to better compete against Apple iOS and Google Android platforms.