Noted tech industry analyst Ross Rubin posed a fun question Wednesday morning on Twitter at which I thought I'd take a Quora-like stab. He asked, "So when does this deluge of low-end Android handsets start and from which OEMs?"

It's really one of the most important questions about Android, because it has long been presumed that Android will be the operating system that finally puts smartphones in the hands of every consumer. Rubin's timing is also impeccable, because for everything we're seeing, the deluge has already begun.

Yesterday, I decided to buy the Galaxy Tab, even though Samsung announced its successor hours earlier. I like the 7-inch form factor, and the Tab seems plenty fast to me, even without those extra cores coming to the Galaxy Tab 10.1. The price is appealing, just $250 after $50 rebate. But the sales process ended abruptly, without a purchase -- not because of last-minute qualms about iPad or worries there wouldn't be enough Android apps. The problem: T-Mobile, like other US carriers, charges too much for the data plans, and they're mandatory.

Tech blogger and Rackspace employee Robert Scoble claims that iPad will win the tablet wars because of mobile applications. "The only thing that matters is the apps," he asserts. Scoble most certainly is wrong about that. What matters more is the price -- how much more people pay for one product compared to the other. As for the apps, Android has huge momentum and plenty of great apps to compete with Apple's App Store -- and more are coming. But that's a separate topic.

Market research group In-Stat has published the results of its annual assessment of U.S. broadband speeds, which found that the nation's average downstream speed increased by 34% over the course of 2010.

In-Stat says the average downlink speed for broadband subscribers is 9.54 Mbps, up from the 2009 average 7.12 Mbps, which was itself up from 2008 average of 3.8 Mbps. The price of fixed broadband, by comparison, rose by only 4% among the 518 households surveyed.

Who doesn't like a cool avatar? What better for an Android user than you personalized as Google's droid mascot? Yesterday, Google released Androidify to the Android Marketplace, which I downloaded last night. The app starts with the typical green droid, which users can customize to suit their fancies. My first effort, and most certainly not my last, is above. I replaced my Facebook and Twitter avatars last night.

The app is easy enough to use, and it's hugely finger friendly. Just touch and drag to resize head, torso or limbs. Google lets users choose attire, hairstyle and other attributes. But Androidify isn't what I expected. For no particular reason, I imagined that Google's app would use the phone's camera to take a photo and Androidify the image. So much for my imagination.

Here's the rub: you can only afford one monitor, and you frequently find yourself wading through window after window trying to find the right document. Or worse still, you need to switch between two or three windows but keep selecting the wrong one because of the dozens of other open apps and windows cluttering up your desktop.

You could close all these down, or you could try a virtual desktop manager. This effectively takes one desktop and multiplies it a number of times, allowing you to organize your open windows into different virtual desktops: one for your work, another for browsing the web and a third for doing your accounts, for example. And when it comes to choosing the right tool for the job, look no further than Finestra Virtual Desktops.

In its annual public report on conditions at its overseas suppliers, Apple said it had noted an increase in child labor as well as tackling the issue of suicides at Foxconn, one of its biggest overseas partners. It also said that it had continued efforts to improve workplace safety and morale, two issues the company had taken heat for ignoring in the past.

Apple said that poor checks had resulted in the increases in child labor over the past year, and it had instituted efforts to assist its suppliers in preventing it from occurring. One case was especially severe, and the company found the supplier was doing little to fix the problem, or appeared willing to.

Nokia is coming under increasing criticism for its partnership with Microsoft, with shareholders looking for the removal of CEO Stephen Elop, and a Finnish union looking for severance pay for workers laid off as a result of the deal. It seems to point to a coming showdown that may rear its ugly head at its annual meeting in July in Helsinki.

The shareholder group calls itself Plan B, and is comprised of nine anonymous "small" shareholders of the company that were also former employees. Among their demands is the firing of Elop, restructuring of the Microsoft deal to limit it to the North American market, and adoption of MeeGo as the company's primary smartphone platform.

Among an announcement of half a dozen new mobile devices, Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC debuted its first Android tablet, called the Flyer. HTC was the first company to release an Android smartphone of any sort and its presence in the Android tablet market could be imposing.

The HTC Flyer is similar to Samsung's Galaxy Tab in a number of ways. Firstly in its size, it has a 7" screen with 1024 x 600 resolution. Secondly, in its OS. It is not running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), the tablet-optimized version of Google's mobile operating system, and will instead run on Android 2.4 (Gingerbread). However it does offer a slightly more powerful processor, running at 1.5 GHz, compared to the Galaxy Tab's 1 GHz.

Somebody call the cops -- eh, antitrust authorities. Apple's subscription plan is here, and it's as bad for many, if not most, publishers as rumored. The first of several key sentences from Apple's press announcement: "Publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a website, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app." That means you Amazon Kindle; before the announcement, all Kindle transactions took place outside the app in a web browser. This change applies to any content, but it's nestled in the subscriptions announcement.

Another piece of nastiness: "Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app." That rule conceptually would prevent some publishers from extending to existing customers the benefits of a free iPad subscription.

You might have read about how the long-warned end of available IPv4 address space is a bit more imminent than it was, as the IANA, which governs IP address allocations on the Internet, has run out of IPv4 addresses to allocate. Simply stated: The IPocalypse is coming! It's not going to be the end of civilization, or even just the Internet, as we know it, but there will be some big problems. We're not prepared for them and we're not even working all that hard on preparing.

Here's what we know will happen in the short term: There are 5 RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) for different parts of the world -- AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and the RIPE NCC. These organizations get address blocks from the IANA and dole them out to ISPs and other entities in their regions based on their own policies.

Mobile World Congress is too great a public relations opportunity for Apple to pass up. The company is notorious for stealing thunder from events like this one. That's why something missing today is so revealing. There was no Apple press release touting Verizon iPhone weekend sales. Even if there was no industry mobile event in Barcelona, it would be typical for Apple to tout early sales, as it did with iPad (300,000 first day) and iPhone 4 (1.7 million first weekend).

Apple's silence strongly suggets that those short lines on launch day were no flukes. I heard lots of excuses, in Betanews comments or Twitter, citing bad weather. For example, in response to my post "Verizon iPhone post mortem: Three lessons and some humble pie," Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg tweeted: "You're kidding right? Preorders and reservations along with frigid weather means no lines. But better prepared than not." To which I responded: "It's sunny here in San Diego and lines are short at Apple Store. 'There's not been a line at any point' said one rep."

Various executive agencies of the U.S. government have come together in an effort to speed up how the government acquires new technology and solutions, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) announced today.

The GSA, in the simplest terms, is a federal body in charge of all of the material stuff the government uses. This includes everything from land, to cars, to IT technology and solutions, and it is also the government body in charge of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).

With Google making efforts to improve the quality of its search results, it is now giving users the opportunity to block certain sites from search results. The extension would be available for its Chrome browser, and user's actions in blocking sites could become part of Google's fight against spam content.

"We've been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content," principal engineer Matt Cutts explained. "One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users."

When Research in Motion adds cellular data to its PlayBook tablet device in the second half of the year, it will commit to higher speed technologies according to statements at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A WiMAX version is set to by sold by Sprint this summer, but RIM will add LTE and HSPA+ versions.

HSPA+ would make the device compatible with a large majority of GSM carriers worldwide that have begun to deploy the technology as an upgrade to their data networks. LTE would make the PlayBook compatible with those further along in their deployments, as well as CDMA providers like Verizon who have chosen the platform for their own wireless data upgrade paths.

You can never have too many backups, and when it comes to backing up you need two different types of backup tools for the best results. When it comes to protecting your precious files -- documents, emails, photos and the like -- either use Windows' own built-in backup tool or, if you want full control over your backup, choose GFI Backup Home Edition instead.

That protects your data, but what about Windows, your programs and your program settings? Do you want to spend hours reinstalling Windows and getting everything set up again in the event of disaster? Or would you prefer to spend 15 minutes or so restoring a recent backup of your computer while it was in perfect working order? Of course you'd prefer the latter, which is where a drive-imaging tool like Paragon Backup & Recovery (Advanced) Free 2011 comes in.