Ed Oswald

Android grabbed the top spot in market share among smart phones sold in the past six months ending in August, data from Nielsen released on Tuesday showed. The platform made up 32 percent of all sales in the month, outpacing Apple, who made up 26 percent of sales, and RIM, which had 25 percent.

RIM had held a sizable lead in the survey until June, staying in a range of 31 to 37 percent of the market since January. However, Android had either increased or maintained its share in every month, unlike Apple, who generally fell during the year. Apple's only saving grace was the release of the iPhone 4, it appears.

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Responding to the increasing size of Twitter, and a desire to go back to his roots in development, Evan Williams said Monday that he would be stepping down as Twitter's CEO, handing the company over to current COO Dick Costolo. Williams had served in the position since 2008.

The change would take effect immediately, Williams wrote in a blog post Monday. "Starting today, I'll be completely focused on product strategy," he said. "Building things is my passion, and I've never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build."

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A Tyler County, Texas court slapped Apple with the fourth largest patent judgement in history on Friday, saying its use of Cover Flow infringed on patents held by Mirror Worlds LLC. The company originally sued Apple back in 2008, claiming infringement on three of its patents across the Cupertino company's Mac, iPod and iPhone products.

Tyler County jurists ruled against Apple on all three counts, and let Mirror Worlds collect $208.5 million for each patent. Apple in turn asked for an emergency stay in US District Court of the ruling, arguing that issues remained on the validity of Mirror World's claims, and that allowing it to collect seperately on each patent equates to "triple dipping."

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In a surprising move said to address antitrust law change concerns, all Sprint executives nominated to Clearwire's board stepped down late Thursday. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, president of strategy and corporate initiatives Keith Cowan, and network operations and wholesale chief Steven Elfman have sat on the board since 2008's merger of Xohm and Clearwire.

Sprint had also nominated four others, but those appointees would keep their board seats. The wireless carrier did however reserve the right to appoint new people to those positions "at a later date." While that may indeed be true, some believe the move could be an effort to clear any concerns over a possible deal with T-Mobile.

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Samsung said Friday that it had committed to Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 operating system, planning to release "several" devices in the US, Europe, and Asia by the end of the year. The Wall Street Journal also indicated that the first Samsung WP7 phone would be released on AT&T on October 11, citing sources.

The Korean phone manufacturer's announcement coincides with its phasing out of Nokia's Symbian platform. Developers registered with the company received an e-mail this week alerting them that Samsung planned to drop support completely for the platform, yet another blow to the now aging OS.

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After a nearly two month search, HP said Thursday that it had selected Leo Apotheker to succeed ousted CEO Mark Hurd. Apotheker had resigned from business software firm SAP in February of this year after serving for nearly two years as the company's chief executive, and a total of nearly two decades within the company.

The company has also named Ray Lane as its new chairman. Hurd had served as both HP's chairman and CEO. In naming Apotheker, HP passed over several potential candidates from within, including printer business chief Vyomesh Joshi, PC head Todd Bradley, storage and server unit chief Dave Donatelli, and enterprise division chief Ann Livermore.

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Data from research firm ChangeWave shows continuing momentum for the Google's mobile platform, with consumers now desiring a new phone based on Android vis a vis the iPhone. 37 percent of respondents who plan to purchase a phone in the next 90 days say they'd like an Android phone, versus 38 percent for the iPhone.

The iPhone 4 only briefly stopped consumers from flocking to Android when it launched in June of this year. As the hype has simmered down, consumer's desire for Android phones has heated up, however. In just one year, interest in the platform has increased six-fold, the firm found.

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One of the signature features of Google's Gmail e-mail service is about to become optional. The company said Wednesday that over the next few days it would allow its users to turn off "conversation view," which organizes e-mail threads onto a single page for easier viewing.

Technical lead Wiltse Carpenter said the move was aimed at drawing in users who may be passing up Gmail because of their dislike for the way it formats your inbox. "The way Gmail organizes mail into conversations is like cilantro," he quipped. "You either love it ... or you hate it."

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Consumers are responding positively to Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system, and thus their satisfaction of their PCs has also increased, the most recent edition of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The effect is being compared to the "halo effect" of Apple's iPod music player, which was thought to have engendered positive feelings about the Mac computer.

Dell's satisfaction score was up three points over last year to a 77, while HP, Acer, and a general "all others" category was up four points also to a 77. The only manufacturer not to see gains was Compaq, which remained at a 74 out of a possible 100. Apple remained on top with a score of 86, which was two points higher than last year. The Cupertino company has led the survey every year since 2004.

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Google on Monday announced that it would offer a two-step security option to certain customers of its Google Apps product, aiming to offer its customers a low cost option for higher security. The new authentication system would combine the traditional password with a verification code sent to the user's mobile phone.

Initially the offering would be available to English users of its Premier, Education and Government editions, with Standard edition customers getting the feature in the coming months. Google wants to ensure they can scale the feature reliability before expanding it to the "hundreds of millions" using the free version.

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If Microsoft wants to build market share for its latest version of its Internet Explorer browser, that may be all but impossible. The company has decided to make IE9 incompatible with Windows XP, as it lacks the necessary technologies to power the new browser.

According to research firm NetApplications, nearly 61 percent of all computers run Windows XP as of August. Windows Vista and Windows 7, both IE9 compatible, make up about 30 percent. In other words, seven in 10 PCs are incompatible right out of the box, a major problem for Microsoft.

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Microsoft said this week that it would not have a version of its upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system compatible with the CDMA standard at launch. Product manager Greg Sullivan told the Wall Street Journal that the company had decided to focus on GSM initially.

While CDMA is quite popular in the US, and is used by three of the top five carriers in the country, GSM is by far the dominant standard worldwide. Microsoft's decision would likely suppress US sales initially given the market share for GSM here is considerably lower than in other countries.

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Yahoo's outspoken CEO Carol Bartz told Reuters in an interview posted late Wednesday that Apple's desire to control the advertising over its iAd mobile advertising service would cause it to "fall apart."

"Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them," she said of the Cupertino company's policies. "Apple wants total control over those ads." Although it wasn't specified, her comments likely stemmed from reports that Apple was exerting some creative control over ads submitted to run on its service.

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The tablet PC sector is heating up, and soon Motorola will be joining the fray. Its co-CEO Sanjay Jha told attendees of a technology conference sponsored by Deustche Bank that his company plans to sell a tablet beginning sometime in 2011. Motorola isn't in a rush to bring the product to the market: it would only do so when it can assure the device could be competitive.

Apple's iPad currently dominates the market, but manufacturers in recent months have shown an interest in developing their own tablets as it appears there is now a sustainable market for them.

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The entertainment industry may have encountered another setback in its efforts to protect its content Monday as a hacker has reportedly cracked high definition content protection, more commonly referred to as HDCP. A supposed "master key" has begun to make its way around the Internet, although its validity has yet to be confirmed.

With the master key, the system no longer works, as hackers would now be able to create their own source and sink keys, both of which are needed to playback content on HDCP-protected devices. Thus a perfect connection could always be ensured between transmitting and receiving devices.

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