Google's mobile operating system picked up tremendous momentum from July to September. Today, during Google's Q3 earnings conference call, CEO Larry Page said that the total number of activations had reached 190 million -- that's up from 135 million three months ago. Last week, Apple reported that it had sold 250 million iOS devices to date, up 25 million during the same time period.

It's no secret that Androids are outselling iOS devices on a sheer volume basis, but based on these numbers, and recent analyst data, momentum is increasing. Whether or not Android can sustain the gains depends on much occurring this month that foreshadows the future. Tomorrow, iPhone 4S officially launches at 8 a.m., local time, whatever that is for you. While many people have expressed disappointment at there being no iPhone 5, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs' untimely death last week could spur a rock star effect of sudden sales. It's now social media-spread folklore that 4S is "For Steve". Similar Jobs allure could likewise lift already hot-selling iPad 2.

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You can call me disappointed. I was psyched for the Google-Samsung event that was scheduled to take place in San Diego, where I live, this week. But then the companies cancelled, claiming they wanted to show respect for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who died last week. Bloggers, journalists and phone geeks had gone gaga over the "Unpacked" event, which presumably was to announce the next Google phone and Android 4.0 -- aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The new invites are out, and as you can see from the image right, there's little doubt what's coming.

But the location isn't good for me, and perhaps not for you. From the companies: "The Samsung/Google media event has been rescheduled to take place on October 19 in Hong Kong, China at S221 Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. The event starts at 10:00 a.m. HKT with doors opening at 9:30 a.m. HKT. The event livestream will be available at YouTube.com/Android at 10 p.m. EST on October 18 for US media who cannot attend the event".

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Publishing and educational tools company Pearson on Thursday launched the beta version of OpenClass, a free, cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that is integrated with Google Apps for Education, and will be available in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Earlier today, techie Ryan Tyler wrote an article for us about Gadgets in higher education, which are certainly a big part of on-site learning. But for remote learning, independent study, scheduling, collaboration, testing, and submission of assignments, the cloud plays a huge, and ever-growing role in higher education.

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Microsoft on Thursday announced that it is broadening the amount of information it publishes from its global vendors regarding their business ethics, environmental policies, labor and human rights standards, and respect for intellectual property.

Microsoft's "Vendor Code of Conduct" is a set of rules that vendors, their employees, agents and subcontractors must adhere to if they want to keep doing business with Microsoft, and the company is looking to make more of this information available to shareholders, customers, and individuals so they can take a deeper look at how Microsoft is holding up its social responsibilities.

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Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis issued a somber apology on Thursday about the worldwide BlackBerry outage that has lasted the better part of a week, and followed it up with a press conference to provide a more detailed explanation of what went wrong in RIM's system.

As the company said yesterday, there was a failure in a single piece of hardware and its failover mechanism that caused a "ripple effect" throughout the entire BlackBerry infrastructure.

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I've never been a big fan of social networking sites.

I'm not on Facebook. Or Myspace. Or LinkedIn. Or Bebo. Or Orkut. Of course, I have to follow what's happening on these services as they are very popular. And I have set up placeholder accounts on them to prevent someone from posing as me. But I don't really use them. And when I monitor these sites, what I can see is that they are more and more targeted by online criminals.

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When it comes to optimizing the performance of your computer it is possible to take a very hands-on approach and get involved in editing the registry and checking that you do not have too many startup programs running. But this is not something that everyone has time for or, indeed, the inclination. PC Check and Tuning 2012 is the latest in a series of system maintenance utilities from MAGIX, and it can be used in a quick, one-click mode -- or you can get more involved if you like.

The one-click mode can be accessed by launching this option from the Start menu, but it is also available in the main program itself. This mode will check for updates for drivers and software you have installed as well as performing a variety of optimization tasks, such as deleted unnecessary files or removing startup items. The program will also check and optimize the registry as well as seeing whether services you don’t need are running.

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It's no secret iPad owners love their devices. The American Customer Satisfaction Index and NPD both report unusually high satisfaction rates for iPad. Just in second quarter, Apple sold more than 9 million tablets, generating $6 billion in revenue. Despite the best efforts of competitors, most of which offer tablets running Android OS, nothing has yet put a dent in iPad’s dominance among consumers. The fact of the matter is that, if you own a tablet right now, it most likely is iPad.

There’s  another group equally smitten by iPad: higher education. I’m not talking about students, faculty or university administrators that own the tablets (I would lump these people in with the consumer category), but rather the growing number of  higher-ed institutions around the country that currently issue iPads to their students.

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I'm quite critical of the Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists for overreaching pretty much anything regarding the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. They'll quote data from firms no one has heard of to make Apple and its products much bigger successes than they are. And because this group is so loudmouth, their exaggerations and lies are widely read and often taken for fact. But ever so occasionally, something altogether legitimate comes along. Today is that day. Mac market share soared during third quarter, according to Gartner and IDC, which both released preliminary data today.

By Gartner's reckoning, Apple's percentage of US PC shipments during the quarter was a stunning 12.9 percent, a solid and unchallenged third place. Fourth-ranked Toshiba had 8.4 percent share. IDC's numbers weren't as magnanimous -- 11.3 percent -- but still better than Apple has had in nearly two decades. But there's more than shocking Mac news in the data. Lenovo has unseated Dell as the No. 2 PC manufacturer worldwide, according to both analyst firms. With HP considering selling off its PC division and given Lenovo's dramatic gains, the China-based company could snatch the top spot in just a few quarters.

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You've been waiting months to upgrade your iPhone 3GS or 4 to iOS 5. Today was supposed to be the day. If you don't mind sitting around waiting for downloads to drip, drip, drip bit by bit, we suggest doing something else more useful with your time.

Updating to iOS 5 is becoming quite the ordeal for some, as Apple's servers are struggling to keep up with demand. Betanews has received and seen numerous reports of unusually long upgrade times, or upgrades failing altogether.

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SoftMaker has released a public beta of its latest office suite, SoftMaker Office 2012. You can download and install the beta until the end of October after which a new beta will be released or the paid versions come into effect, offering both Standard and Professional flavors.

SoftMaker Office Professional 2012 includes an email client and task management/calendar program, which isn’t included in the beta. The beta also lacks the Berlitz dictionaries that come with the full version and its help files are for the 2010 version of the suite. However, in all other respects the software is fully functional.

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iOS 5 may have only just been released, but Apple wasted no time whatsoever in releasing apps that have been designed with the new version of the operating system in mind. First off the starting blocks is Find My Friends which, as the name suggests, makes it possible for a group of friends to share their location with each other with a view to meeting up -- or just tracking where everyone is.

You can adjust privacy settings so that your location is only shared when you want and with the people you are happy to share with. Should you decide you want to discover where your friends are -- if you need to meet them in an new town, for example -- you can send a request from within the app and, assuming they consent, their location will be displayed on a map for you. Find My Friends can also provide you with directions so you can meet up as quickly as possible.

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Early this afternoon, Apple flipped the switch making iCloud and its next-version mobile operating system broadly available. To use one you'll need the other, and for Mac owners that also means OS X 10.7.2. If you didn't get iTunes 10.5 yesterday, you'll need it, too.

In many respects, the big news from Apple this week isn't iPhone 4S, no matter how long the buying lines might be come Friday, but iCloud and iOS 5. As I contended earlier today: "iCloud is Apple's killer app". iCloud is a synchronization service that pushes email, contacts and calendars -- like predecessor MobileMe -- and offers online data storage. But there's much more, such as synchronization of applications or digital content like music and movies purchased from the App Store across devices. It's unsurprising that Apple would take a sync-across devices approach. After all, the company generates most of its revenue from selling hardware, not offering cloud services.

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What do you do if you're Samsung, and want to stick it to one of your biggest rivals in the mobile space during what will be their biggest sales weekend of the year? You set up shop right down the street.

That's exactly what Samsung has done to Apple in downtown Sydney, setting up a pop-up store two doors down from the Cupertino company's sole location in the city. The Samsung shop opened its doors on Monday and will be open through this Sunday, overlapping the launch weekend of the iPhone 4S.

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Ahead of the update to Google TV's software that will bring the Android Market to TV, Google has released the final add-on to the Android SDK that lets developers port their Android apps over to Google's set top box interface.

This add-on is nearly identical to the preview that Google released two months ago, but Product Manager Ambarish Kenghe pointed out two differences between them.

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