The fact that there are two main Android development tracks often gets lost in the shuffle.

Google's retirement of the Nexus One reminded consumers that, hey, that's the only Android phone out there right now running FroYo (Android 2.2,) and cutting its availability is stifling the bleeding edge of Android technology, isn't it?

Google's image search service will be getting a revamp this week, aimed at making the search function easier to use, and to provide more relevant results. The redesign is essentially the service's first major makeover since Google Images went live in 2001.

At that time, only 250 million images had been catalogued by the Mountain View, Calif. search company. Now over 10 billion images are indexed. With such an increase in volume, obviously the search functionality will need to improve, as does the way the site displays ever larger results.

Sweden's copyright and telecommunications reform party, officially known as the Pirate Party, has been involved with a lot of drama in the last year, mostly surrounding its involvement with The Pirate Bay torrent tracking site and its related legal fallout.

Now, the Pirate Party is getting behind a startup ISP called, appropriately, PirateISP, which provides broadband Internet connections that are regulated according to the party's politics: private, secure connections where no logs are retained, and no user data is available to the Swedish Government.

Today, Apple set the stage for a historical competitive upset: Exceeding Microsoft revenue during the same quarter. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple's quarterly earnings again blew past Wall Street consensus, which already were $1.55 billion to $1.75 billion higher than company guidance. Apple also exceed quarterly revenue consensus estimates for Microsoft, which announces fiscal 2010 results on Thursday. I first posted about Apple revenue exceeding Microsoft revenue in April and again in June, not once but twice.

After the bell, Apple reported $15.7 billion revenue and net profits of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 a share. A year earlier, Apple reported revenue of $9.73 billion and $1.83 billion net quarterly profit, or $2.01 per share. Revenue rose 61 percent year over year and earnings by 78 percent. Fiscal 2010 third quarter ended June 26, 2010. By the way, analyst revenue consensus for Microsoft is $15.27 billion.

Microsoft announced pricing and availability on Tuesday for its Kinect motion sensing controller for the Xbox 360, saying the device would be available November 4 at a price of $149.99. The release of the Kinect means that Microsoft would square off this holiday season against Sony, who also plans to release its own system.

Microsoft would bundle the Kinect controller and an Xbox 360 console with 4GB of internal memory for $299.99. The console itself would begin selling on its own for $199.99 on August 3, however.

Today, Microsoft has released the next version of Microsoft Security Essentials in beta. The free anti-malware service was first debuted in 2009 after Microsoft discontinued Windows Live OneCare.

The beta, available on Microsoft Connect today, includes a number of new features: a new protection engine and network inspection system, integration with Windows Firewall, and integration with Internet Explorer for web-based malware protection.

Today, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) announced a new consumer-facing brand for the DRM system it has been working on for more than two years: UltraViolet.

DECE has more than 60 members, and includes most of the biggest names in content distribution and consumer electronics: Best Buy, Fox, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Sony, Warner Brothers, Panasonic, Paramount Pictures, Dolby Labs, and Comcast, to name just a few.

Following yesterday's announcement that Nokia-Siemens would be acquiring Motorola's wireless infrastructure business for $1.2 billion, Nokia Siemens turns around and announces a $7 billion agreement to deploy, install, operate and maintain the U.S.' first wholesale LTE network from the newly formed company LightSquared.

LightSquared is the name of the multi-billion dollar network Harbinger Capital partners has been planning to build as an alternative for network operators who cannot afford to build an LTE network of their own, like T-Mobile USA. The company will build the network, and then lease it to operators. It will not directly offer services to consumers.

As powerful chips are being made physically smaller, cheaper, and significantly less energy consumptive than previous generations, they can be used in places where computers hadn't gone before. More tasks can be automated and measured, more systems can be networked together, and machines can generally get a lot "smarter."

This is perhaps the main idea behind Marvell's plug computing initiative, where an entire system as powerful as a netbook can be built into a housing only marginally larger than a "wall wart" style power adaptor.

In the midst of a Summertime e-reader price war, initiated by Borders, matched by Barnes and Noble, and escalated by Amazon, e-books are flying off of their virtual shelves.

Today, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced second quarter Kindle sales are fully accelerated, with each month outselling the last. But since cutting the price in June, sales have massively spiked.

Social networking company Foursquare is in talks with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo over using its data to help enrich search results, UK paper The Telegraph reported on Monday. According to co-founder Dennis Crowley, the data would be anonymized and then shared.

Foursquare is one of the most rapidly growing social networking services on the Internet. Last week, it signed up its two millionth user, just three months after signing up one million. Word of mouth seems to be driving a lot of the growth, as friends sign up to follow one another.

Microsoft has finished the Technical Preview of Windows Phone 7, the absolute earliest build of the new mobile operating system that is ready for field testing, and is shipping it out on prototype devices from Asus, LG, and Samsung, the company reported today.

As Microsoft noted last week when it released the updated Windows Phone Developer Toolkit, devices with a pseudo-beta version of Windows Phone 7 have begun shipping to developers, carriers, and partners. The new mobile operating system is still quite a few months away from being ready for release, and there isn't yet a version for consumers to check out, but this marks the "home stretch" for platform development. The company expects the first Windows Phone 7 devices to be released in time for the holiday shopping season this year.

European telecommunications giant Nokia-Siemens announced today that it will acquire the majority of Motorola Inc's wireless network infrastructure business for $1.2 billion.

Nokia Siemens announced this morning that it will acquire Motorola's GSM and CDMA infrastructure business, while Motorola will keep its iDEN business, potentially all of its intellectual property related to the wireless network infrastructure business, and "other selected assets."

Today, Google sealed the fate of its former flagship Android device, the HTC Nexus One, by announcing that the smartphone will no longer be available online from the search company's own site.

This announcement finalizes Google's plan to shut down its Web-based smartphone store after it failed to live up to expectations. Customer support will still be available in the U.S., and the device will continue to be available to Android developers. Additionally, the Nexus One will be sold through carrier partners in Europe, Asia, "and possibly others based on local market conditions."

Google moved to better its search results by acquiring Metaweb, a San Francisco based company that maintains an open database of "things," and their relationships to one another. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Metaweb's database currently includes some 12 million items, including places, notable people, companies, and movies. Queries to the Google search algorithm would return more relevant results as a result of the company's technology, the company claims.