Google’s Android mobile operating system could be running on 18 to 20 devices by the end of 2009, according to Andy Rubin, Google’s senior director for mobile platforms. The Android OS is also expected to be on netbooks, soon, reports E-Week.

Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference in San Francisco, Rubin said eight or nine manufacturers will be involved in the creation of the Android-equipped phones. HTC is currently preparing Google Android smartphones for the Chinese and Canadian markets for a June rollout.

Motorola has changed Operating Systems mid-stream. Originally slated to run Windows Mobile, a Motorola Android phone will be released by the third quarter this year.

Android will continue to be open-source. Manufacturers have the option of installing Android “obligation-free” onto their devices or sign a distribution agreement with Google will allow them to pre-install Google Apps onto their devices. A third option, called the “Google Experience,” opens up the manufacturer’s devices to Google Apps and the Android Market.

ARM-based devices — both Netbooks and handhelds — lack a Windows operating system and can’t run PC applications. Freescale and others are looking to Google’s Android OS to counter the marquee draw that Windows has for Netbooks.

Strategy Analytics forecast global Android smartphone shipments to grow 900 percent annually during 2009. Analysts have previously suggested that Android, which originally rolled out in August 2008, will be running on about 12 percent of global smartphones by 2012.

This week, both Verizon and AT&T said they would offer the Pre in the future. Sprint doesn’t have a breakout phone like AT&T’s iPhone or Verizon’s Blackberry. Right now, Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, is easily commanding the enterprise space while the iPhone dominates the consumer space.

The confirmation from Sprint came on Thursday afternoon from Sprint spokesman James Fisher who simply said, “We have the Pre through 2009.” The length of the exclusive isn’t really much of a surprise given Sprint’s track record of exclusives in the past, which usually last six to nine months, and it falls within Verizon’s timeline.

The Pre gains iTunes compatibility by telling the desktop app that it is an iPhone that doesn’t understand Apple’s copy-protection. This allows the Pre to download content that isn’t copy protected, including iTunes Plus and music that users have uploaded themselves.

Sprints Palm Pre goes on sale nationwide June 6 for $199.99 with a two-year contract.

Aside from announcing the Sony Ericsson Yari gesture-enabled phone, SE has launched another new mobile phone this time called the Satio. Whereas the Yari is being geared for mobile gamers, Satio on the other hand is more of a multimedia phone with nifty features such as 3.5” screenin crystal clear 16:9 widescreen format and a 12.1 megapixel camera.

If the Sony Ericsson Satio looks lovely familiar to you, that’s because it was already introduced in Barcelona before as the Idou phone.

This new Sony Ericsson phone provides quick access to all your media content in one place. It features five standby panels for accessing your favorite features of the phone.

Additionally, the Satio’s 12.1 MP camera also features an intuitive touch focus, Xenon flash, red-eye reduction, smile detection and other nice features. It also provides quick access to social networking sites and allows you to produce huge photo prints plus a direct commenting feature for your picture.

Other notable features of the Sony Ericsson Satio include music, movie and games download via PlayNow arena, especially developed ring tones and music and DRM-free music tracks and Track ID.

Its other specs include 3.5” widescreen, Symbian OS, intuitive full touch media menu, music player, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, A-GPS with turn-by-turn direction, video capture and video streaming through YouTube, FM Radio, 128MB internal memory and micro SD card support.

Sony Ericsson has just announced the Yari phone featuring gesture gaming technology. The Yari offers various gesture-enabled games as well as other motion and standard games. It provides users with a games carousel for quick access of all games from a user’s desktop as well as for browsing downloadable games at Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow arena.The Sony Ericsson Yari seemed like a mobile version of the Nintendo Wii wherein you control the game with your gestures rather than with control pad buttons.  It also has A/B buttons for gaming shortcut keys.  The Yari even comes with an EC500 phone stand with integrated keyring for easy playing time.

The Sony Ericsson Yari runs on GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 and UMTS/HSDPA 900/2100 network.  Its other major features incude a 5.0 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom, auto focus, face detection, photo feeds, photo fix, photo light, smile detection, video light and direct sending to the web. The phone also features a music player, stereo speakers, location tracking by SMS, music shake control, Google search, web feeds, Bluetooth stereo, bookmarks, email, instant messaging, auto rotate function, FM Radio with RDS, A-GPS, and other PIM features.

Other specs include 2.4″ TFT display, 1GB microSD support, up to 10 hrs talk time and up to 450 hrs of standby time.

The Sony Ericsson Yari is slated for release in Q4 and will be available in Achromatic Black and Cranberry White.

Samsung Mobile and U.S. Cellular announced the release of the new compact flip phone dubbed – Samsung Gloss. This highly fashionable mobile phone may seem purely eye candy, and yet it is packed with some good functional features. In fact, you would not even think that this tiny flip phone has a QWERTY keyboard which makes it ideal for heavy text message senders.The Samsung Gloss aka SCH-U440 boasts of a nifty 1.3 megapixel camera and music player and supports up to 16GB of external memory perfect for storing your music, pictures and video files.

By being released through US Cellular Network, the Samsung Gloss gets easy access to the network’s enhanced wireless data application services including easyedge. Easyedge gives users access to Your Navigator service with full voice turn by turn directions, news, and weather applications, games as well as other useful mobile applications.

For fans of mobile music tones, the Samsung Gloss is preloaded with US Cellular’s Tone Room which is a ringtone shop featuring digital music files. It also features CITY ID which is an enhanced Caller ID that displays the city and state of incoming callers.

Other features of the Samsung Gloss include Stereo Bluetooth and a 2.2″ CIF TFT display with landscape view.

A round up of iPhone apps featured the last couple of weeks in textually blogs:

TEXTUALLY

Walt Mossberg’s All Things Digital app.

Elvis impersonator sightings.

Chicago 2016 Olympic bid app.

People Magazine’s up-to-the-minute celebrity news.

Meet a stranger with iBatko.

inapkin app for scribbling.

Turn your contacts into B-BOTs.

Celebrity app puts you on the cover.

Proloquo2Go helps people who have difficulty speaking.

WATCHING TV ONLINE

Warner Bros releases film iphone apps.

RINGTONIA

400 Human Ringtones and Sound Affects

A flurry of recent research has documented that talking on a cell phone poses a dangerous distraction for drivers and others whose attention should be focused elsewhere. Now, a new study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology finds that just the ring of a cell phone may be equally distracting, especially when it comes in a classroom setting or includes a familiar song as a ringtone. News & Information from Washington University reports.

In any setting where people are trying to acquire knowledge and trying to retain that information in some way, a distraction that may just seem like a common annoyance to people may have a really disruptive effect on their later retention of that information,” said the study’s lead author, Jill Shelton, a postdoctoral psychology fellow in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

… “Many of us consider a cell phone ringing in a public place to be an annoying disruption, but this study confirms that these nuisance noises also have real-life impacts,” Shelton said. “These seemingly innocuous events are not only a distraction, but they have a real influence on learning.”

Titled “The distracting effects of a ringing cell phone: An investigation of the laboratory and the classroom setting,” the study was conducted at Louisiana State University, where Shelton received her doctoral degree. Her co-authors in the LSU psychology department include Emily Elliott, Sharon Eaves and Amanda Exner.

Read full article.

Mobile Spy 3.0 for iPhone from Retina-X Studios enables you to surreptitiously monitor everyone who contacts your friends, family, children, and employees . The clandestine program runs as a background app, and automatically tracks and records SMS messages, phone calls, and GPS locations.

[via I4U]