Whalen said that the company has been “talking to everybody” about Medfield and that the company first “took a conscious decision to focus on Android,” since “at the moment [Intel's] customers are asking for Android” but that iOS remains a consideration as it continues to grow. But Apple has little reason to want to open its arms to Intel’s mobile processors and plenty of reason to keep them closed, in fact.

It’s not that Intel’s efforts aren’t praiseworthy: The company needs a strong mobile platform, and Medfield looks strong. It’s an SoC that seems like it can hold its own with ARM’s latest, and there is even good reason to believe it will have a strong foothold in the Android market a year from now, not the least of which is Motorola’s endorsement of the platform.

But don’t expect to see Apple’s mobile devices rush to embrace x86 architecture anytime soon. Cupertino has done a lot to make sure that it maintains total control over its chip designs, which are based on licensed ARM architecture. It has acquired two chip-making firms and no doubt worked out extensive, high-volume fabrication contracts with chip-making partners like Samsung to ensure that it can deliver an SoC that is carefully tailored to work with its mobile software and hardware. That affords it advantages when it comes to system performance, power consumption and more; so much of an advantage, in fact, that an analyst recently said Apple had a leg up on Intel when it came to mobile chips.

Apple may have switched to Intel from PowerPC, a tech it helped create, for its Mac line of computers, but the mobile market is not the PC market. Intel still has plenty to prove when it comes to its ability to operate in the realm of smartphones and tablets, and for now, Apple has invested years of development time and huge amounts of money in making ARM-based designs that perfectly suit its software and hardware.

Apple’s recent acquisition of Anobit shows that it wants more, not less control over its product components. That desire for control combined with Whalen’s caginess when talking about Apple specifically lead me to believe it will still be a long time (if ever) before we see Intel architecture in an iOS device.

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Regional differences in some areas showed strong discrepancies between the growth rate of the two platforms. In Germany and the U.S., for instance, iOS far outstripped Android’s growth, with around 15 or 16 times the average new device activations, vs about 11 to 12 times for Android hardware. The iPad and the iPod seem to make the difference; in countries where iOS beat Android, there were many more of both devices activated. In the U.S., Localytics saw 21 times more iPod touches activated than usual, vs 14 times more iPhones, for example.

Android did very well in Asia and parts of Europe, while Apple dominated in key markets like the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. Of the top 20 countries in terms of mobile device popularity, Google’s mobile platform grew more quickly in 14; still, Apple pulled ahead overall, since Android grew approximately 12 times faster than usual v. Apple’s 12.5 times improvement.

Localytics compiled the data using information from its mobile analytics platform, which is in use on more than 200 million devices worldwide via its development partners.

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HTC CEO Peter Chou said on Tuesday the company already has a workaround ready for the feature found to be in violation of Apple’s patent by the U.S. trade regulatory body. According to Chou, the feature has already been removed from its phones following the ruling on Monday. The feature in question is something most smartphone users have come to expect — for example, the ability to recognize phone numbers or addresses in a note or email, then open the relevant application when that data is tapped — so while working around the issue has immediate benefits for HTC, it might also have negative lasting impact.

Google Mobile SVP Andy Rubin said during a news conference with Chou that the ruling was actually a good one for Android, since it dealt with a feature that wasn’t necessarily instrumental to the OS, but was instead a “user interface feature of an application,” leading him to believe “patent peace on the overall platform” is still an achievable goal.

While it appears true that in this case HTC will be able to continue selling its devices in the U.S. after the April 19, 2012 deadline set by the ITC for the import ban, Apple’s win still isn’t exactly as inconsequential as Rubin and Chou would like to make it out to be. The average user might not take immediate notice of the feature’s absence, but if Apple continues to win these concessions (and should competing manufacturers be forced to use its suggested design guidelines through patent cases like the recent one in Australia, for example), user experience on platforms like Android could degrade considerably.

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Number six on the annual list was Apple’s iPhone 5, the Mac-maker’s highest placing search term, and ironically, one for a product that didn’t actually ship in 2011. Instead of an iPhone 5, Apple released the iPhone 4S, but leading up to the unveiling of that product, speculation was rampant and the iPhone 5 name was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

The rumored device reportedly featured a larger screen and thinner body, in addition to the 8 megapixel camera and Siri voice assistant that shipped with the 4S. It’s high positioning on this list bodes well for when Apple actually releases an iPhone 5 (if it’ll be called that) in 2012. The iPhone 5 hit its stride in the week of Sept. 25, 2011, at basically the fever pitch point of rumors about the iPhone one week ahead of the 4S unveiling.

The iPad 2 was the number 10 fastest-rising term in 2011, and had the benefit of being an actual shipping product, too. Searches for iPad 2 rose 939 percent from 2010 to 2011, and peaked in February two weeks ahead of the day the tablet actually went on sale in the U.S. online and in stores. The iPad 3 didn’t make the top 10 overall, but it is number 10 in the category of Consumer Electronics for Google’s 2011 fastest-rising global search terms. Something tells me it’ll pick up considerably in popularity over the next few months.

Finally, Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs also scored a place, coming in at number nine on the list. The consumer electronics pioneer passed away in October of 2011, and that’s exactly when his popularity on the search engine reached its peak. Jobs’ death was front-page news around the world, and his death prompted multiple media events, documentaries and the early release of his authorized biography.

Apple had other successes too in terms of capturing the attention of Googlers worldwide, including the iPhone 4S, which the second-fastest riser in the Consumer Electronics subcategory, just behind the Amazon Kindle Fire. The full Google Zeitgeist site is a very pretty, interactive exploration of the year in review from the perspective of the world’s most popular search engine, and definitely merits a closer look if you want to discover more.

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The ruling includes an injunction that is “preliminarily enforceable” against Apple Sales International, Apple’s Ireland-based EU wholesale subsidiary. The injunction covers a wide range of products, including all iPhones as well as 3G-enabled iPads, since it deals with European patent 1010336 (B1), which describes a “method for performing countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system.”

It’s a significant ruling, because although Motorola previously secured a similar injunction against Apple in Germany, that one was based on a default judgment, meaning that Apple never presented a defense in the case. For Friday’s ruling, the court ruled after both sides had the opportunity to present their full arguments.

Apple will no doubt appeal this ruling to the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court, seeking a stay of the injunction. If it fails in that effort, the Mannheim Regional Court has attached a €100 million ($134 million) bond (much lower than the $2.7 billion Apple was seeking) to the decision, which Motorola would be liable to pay in the event the injunction against Apple is enforced and a later appeal overturns the injunction awarded on Friday.

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Well, Google Currents is a slightly different product than Flipboard or its ilk, since it doesn’t draw links directly from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Instead, it grabs content from discrete sources. Currents offers many sources to choose from (including GigaOM) in a variety of categories, and it even allows you to follow individual content curators, like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki, or any Google+ public stream. It ties into Google+ quite closely, in fact, letting users share articles or content they discover within Current with the Google social network.

Content is a little more organized than in Flipboard or other apps, and publishers have more control over how it appears, thanks to a self-service platform also launched on Thursday that allows them to brand and customize their content, even without developer know-how. It’s a nice way to both encourage small producers to get on board with Currents and also help expand Google’s available content library for readers. Publishers also get the opportunity to easily tie their content to Google Analytics to better track reader interaction and engagement.

Currents plays nice with Google Reader, too, so if you already managed most of your reading through Google’s RSS service, you can bring it with you and get the advantages of Currents’ news discovery tools. A lot of the content from its partners is also available in full, so articles are rendered beautifully in their entirety for reading in either landscape or portrait mode directly in-app.

It’s a good-looking reader, featuring clean lines and smooth animations, and it allows for very granular control over what kind of content you do and don’t see. It reminds me of a better-executed version of Yahoo Livestand, with more content and improved social hooks. Also, on the iPhone, I actually find it better organized than Flipboard and more easy to parse. In short, it delivers on the promise of the Yahoo product, which means Flipboard and others in the same business should definitely take note.

One major limitation of Currents so far, however, is that it’s U.S.-only for the time being. That could limit its appeal, but Google will likely try to expand its availability to other countries once it can work out licensing details, if the U.S. launch goes well.

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In the old version, users had to purchase their offers via other means, then could redeem and track them via the Google Shopper app. Now you can buy the offers directly, and also subscribe to offers for specific locations right from an iPhone. The purchases you make bypass Apple’s in-app purchase system entirely, and instead use Google Checkout to complete the transaction via an in-app browser interface.

But the Shopper update is just one of three major recent Google software changes that bring features previously only available on Android devices to the iPhone and iPad. Just Monday, for instance, Google+ got an update that brought improved notifications, full resolution photo uploading, and search function. And late last month, the Google Search iPad app got a considerable overhaul, which introduced slick built-in quick-access interfaces for Google Apps, making it almost like a limited version of Chrome OS within an app.

Google’s doing a good job right now of making sure its experiences reach as broad an audience as possible, but which experiences, specifically? Google+, its fledgling social network, is a major play to win back some of the ground it has already given up to Facebook in terms of being a destination on the web. In order to succeed at its goal of amassing as many users as possible, Google is aware that it has to reach mobile users on the platform where they live, even if that’s not its own.

Google Shopper, especially now with its local offers, is likewise a product that benefits Google most by being in front of as many eyes as possible. It’s purely about advertising reach and selling to groups, so it makes sense that Google would want to count iOS users among potential customers.

With the Google Search app for iPad update, the goal is once again to make sure as many people as possible are using its search products and apps like Docs, all of which help drive traffic to its primary properties and therefore, encourage ad revenue, too.

In short, Google’s improvements to its iOS business are strictly self-interested, which means users hoping to gain some of the more useful elements of Google services on Android devices will likely ultimately be disappointed. Don’t expect turn-by-turn navigation in Maps, for instance, or an official Google Music native player; these are things that remain valuable as competitive advantages for Android devices, rather than as standalone efforts to be promoted in and of themselves.

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• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
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In a statement, the company said:

We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.

Sprint has admitted to receiving data from CarrierIQ’s software, but it denies using it to track its customers, as has AT&T, which says it uses the information for network management. Verizon, on the other hand, has denied using the software, as has Google on any of the Android phones it makes.

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With numbers like that, iOS device owners have nothing to fear when it comes to the possibility of developers fleeing en masse to Android as it becomes the world’s dominant mobile operating system. And it looks like Apple will retain that crown for a long time, too, even if trends continue to favor Android: Munster suggests Apple will keep more than 70 percent of mobile app revenue share for the next three or four years.

Why? Android apps just don’t make anywhere near as much money through Google’s Market, nor are they downloaded as often. By Munster’s calculations, the Android Market has around 6,750,000,000 downloads to date, compared to Apple’s 18,566,331,811. Those have resulted in respective gross revenues of $341,765,335 and $4,939,611,127 respectively. Of the gross revenue, developers have seen $239,235,734 from the Market, while $3,457,727,789 has been paid out to those making software for iOS. Percentage-wise, paid apps account for only 1.3 percent of Android apps, vs 13.5 percent for iOS.

The difference is striking, and will mean Apple’s platform is likely to continue to hold a strong lead over Google’s when it comes to the breadth and depth of software selection. It also means Apple isn’t likely to freak out if Google moves a few more devices per year than it does; a strong ecosystem should keep customers coming back in strong enough numbers to keep iOS device and software revenue extremely high despite dwindling market share.

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Based on my quick tests, the app as it stands now is pretty much the same one Kevin took a look at following its first retracted release. This time around, however, you aren’t greeted with a bug notification immediately upon launch, and push notifications appear to be working, although oddly, there’s no way to turn Banner notifications on in iOS 5, so the phone just vibrates and displays nothing when a new email comes in.

Be sure to check out Kevin’s post for a more detailed look at how the Gmail app works. Suffice it say, it’s pretty much like the Android version in a lot of ways, and seems like it could be an HTML5 app in a native iOS wrapper. I’ll stick with Gmail set up as an Exchange account in the native iOS Mail app, but Google’s free native app may be more your speed if you miss things like Priority Inbox icons and labels.

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The program has three major components: Calendar Cleaner, Contacts Cleaner and Sync Tune-Up. If you want just one of the components, you can purchase the first two separately at the Mac App Store. However it’s likely you’ll need all three so I recommend the buying the full package.

Contacts Cleaner looks for issues that could cause errors such as invalid characters, malformed phone numbers as well as duplicate information. What I like about this program is that it not only finds the errors, but tells you why it thinks they represent a problem. For example, I’d often put “husband and wife” in the First Name field, but Contacts Cleaner warns me “This contact has a space in the first name. In some cases these names can become transposed after syncing with Google.” Sure enough when I went into Google, I noticed that problem.

Calendar Cleaner does similar checks for errors that can occur with your various sync destinations. My calendar was fraught with malformed recurring events that wouldn’t sync, and a pass by Calendar Cleaner fixed those in no time.

Both programs give you the option of opening the item within Address Book or iCal in order to make sure you know what kind of change is being made before you authorize it. Apple’s Address Book application looks for merged items itself, but doesn’t give you options to control what is merged. iCal users have no built-in options to search for duplicates and merge events.

Finally, Sync Tune-Up (only available as part of the bundle) gives you a front end for more fine-grained control over fixing your sync-related issues, such as de-registering individual devices and software, or the “nuclear” option which rebuilds the entire sync database. If your sync is taking extra long or you’ve made a bunch of changes with your devices or accounts, a nice reset can do you a world of good. A good indication of problems can be found by looking at your console logs and looking for mentions of the “truth” and too much vacuuming.

The more you sync, the more likely it is that problems will occur. To prevent or repair these problems, Spanning Tools is a great option.

Disclosure: Spanning Tools provided a copy of the software for review purposes.

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In Settings > Safari, you can choose your default search engine under “General,” between either Google (the one automatically chosen if you haven’t changed it), Yahoo or Bing. When you ask Siri simply to “Search for” something, it will use whichever search engine you have chosen in Settings.

But if you want to temporarily switch engines for just one search, all you need to do is ask Siri to check with a specific search service. For example, “Search Bing for Windows Phone 7.5″ will use Microsoft’s search portal to return results, even if you have Google selected as your default engine. It also keeps your default engine the same.

While you may not often have cause to take a brief vacation from your search engine of choice, this can come in handy if you’re comparing the order of results for a search term across services, or if you find one service better than another for specific types of searches, like images, places or directions.

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The report from the Dispatch describes slow or severed connections that students at the University of Missouri-Columbia experienced when coming back to classes this September. At that U.S. school, the number of wireless devices active on the network at any one time maxed out at 900 last year. Already in 2011, it’s hit 8,000 devices actively using the school’s connection at once.

The iPad is the biggest change in terms of the mobile connected-device landscape in recent years. Apple’s tablet still owns the market for that category of device, and it’s an optimal device for consuming streaming video, since it features a much larger display than smartphones, but is much simpler to turn on and hold than a cumbersome notebook computer. The iPad alone was already equal to Android’s share of online mobile video consumption back in May, and Apple’s other devices occupy a huge slice of the pie, too.

While Apple’s iPad may have multiplied the problem, iPhones and other smartphones have already significantly affected demand for Wi-Fi on college campuses. Students now expect strong on-campus Wi-Fi as one of the perks associated with going to school–it factors into their feeling of satisfaction over what they pay in tuition. Washington University’s Andrew Orstadt, who is the associated vice chancellor for information services and technology, says the demand for high capacity should be met within reason, no matter what students end up using the bandwidth for. He told the Dispatch that since students live on campus, schools should “make sure they are doing what they want to do” with their recreation time, too.

The challenge now is for schools to be able to meet the growing demand for reliable Wi-Fi with a growing population of connected devices with increasing technical specs. Next-gen devices will be able to stream higher-quality video to and from the web, and do more than one task at a time without as much of a cost on battery life or processor power. Students two years from now could likely be streaming one full HD video to their tablets while downloading another two equally high-bandwidth files in the background.

Apple’s devices may only be fuel for the fire that is demand for college Wi-Fi Internet access, but the iPad’s success and the rise in connected-device usage seen by the University of Missouri-Columbia in the wake of its introduction is a good sign that as far as fuel goes, it’s the rocket-powering kind.

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Apple has an 89-percent retention rate, according to a survey conducted by UBS Research. The research firm polled 515 smartphone owners asking which phones they owned and their next likely smartphone purchase. While the sample size is very small, it does give us a view into broader trends in the smartphone market.

In general, retention rates appear to be falling for most of the OEMs. Relatively, Apple’s retention rates have held up incredibly well even as its market share has risen. Interestingly, when we look at all consumers who are considering changing handset OEM provider, Apple remains a significant net beneficiary. Alongside Apple, only Samsung and HTC also appear as net beneficiaries (more users won than users lost). Interestingly, of our respondents who are current Apple subscribers, only 6% indicated that they intended to move to a different OEM, with 4% saying they were undecided. This suggests that the retention rate for Apple could end up being as high as 93%. [UBS Research]

RIM has seen its retention rate drop from 62 percent to 33 percent over past 18 months, when UBS conducted a similar survey in March 2010. In comparison to Apple, Android (ecosystem-wide) has a retention of 55 percent and HTC has a retention rate of about 39 percent. Samsung has a retention rate of 28 percent. Nokia, which had an implied retention rate of 42 percent, has seen it drop to 24 percent. Ouch!

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A new Qantas trial pilot program will see one of the airline’s Boeing 767-300 jets outfitted with one iPad 2 for each passenger, according to the Australian Business Traveller. Each of the aircraft’s 254 seats will have its own iPad 2, and there will also be several spares kept on hand just in case. All seats pockets will carry an iPad 2, but business-class travelers will also get a flexible stand to use with their fold-out meal tray.

The iPads won’t be tethered to seats, but they will carry a software theft deterrent of sorts: Each boots directly into and only has access to Qantas’ proprietary Q Streaming app, which provides access to its in-flight entertainment library over Wi-Fi but which is also rendered useless upon leaving the plane.

The pilot program is about testing Qantas’ in-flight Wi-Fi streaming capabilities, Qantas Executive Manager for Customer Experience Alison Webster told the ABT. The ultimate goal is to be able to provide passengers with access to the Q Streaming service through their own devices, be they Apple’s iPads and iPhones or Android tablets and handsets.

If the initial test proves a success, Qantas plans to expand it to ten Boeing 767-300 jets, complete with iPad brackets installed in seat backs. Passengers who opt to use their own devices will also have the option of downloading a video to watch within 24 hours of leaving a plane, should they land before they finish their show or movie.

With iPads in the cockpit and iPads in the cabin, the air travel industry is becoming a perfect use case of how Apple’s devices appeal to companies for both consumer-facing and internal business use. Let’s hope Qantas’ example catches on here in North America and in the rest of the world, too. That shouldn’t be too tall of an order, since Q Streaming is based on the same technology that powers Virgin America’s just-announced in-flight entertainment system.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Katy Pearce

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That was before Google acquired the property in 2003, bringing co-founder Evan Williams, who would go on to co-found Twitter, into the fold for a brief spell. Blogger has a storied history, but in recent years, competition from Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress has taken the shine off of this particular apple. Google’s decision to bring iOS editing tools out for the service is a smart move, but mostly one that looks a little like playing catch-up, since the above-mentioned services all have similar apps out already.

The Blogger apps work very well, though. You sign in with your Google credentials, and then it puts you right into a composition window for your most recently active Blogger blog, if you already have one. I’d forgotten that I actually have quite a long list of Blogger sites, none of which are active any longer. Still, it’s kind of nice to see that Google is ready and willing in case I want to go back to publishing artsy poetry critiques like I did back in college.

The interface is very spare, providing you with all the tools you need on the top and bottom bars, and leaving a large open space in the middle for uncluttered composition. Transitions happen quickly, and as soon as you edit any of the content fields, the back button turns into a save button. That actually might not be ideal if you want to revert changes you’ve made, but for a quick, light mobile blogging experience it fits the bill. Adding photos from your library or the camera, as well as location info, is handled through three easy access buttons at the bottom of the composition window.

Additional options allow you to quickly switch between your active blogs or choose the default size for posted images, and you can quickly check out what your blog currently looks like on the web, too.

For a barebones editor, Blogger has all your bases covered, in terms of being able to post, change and automatically update your blog’s content. But Google once again seems oblivious of Apple’s larger-screened devices; Blogger works on the iPad, but only in compatibility mode. It’s especially annoying because for an app like this that features a very minimal user interface, a simple port for the iPad’s resolution wouldn’t be asking much.

I left behind my Blogger blogs a long time ago, and though Google got a lot of things right with this app, there isn’t anything there to turn my head away from more recent services like Tumblr or Posterous. And the spartan nature of Google’s app suggests that’s what it wants to accomplish. Anyone excited by this app’s arrival, or is it a case of too little, too late?

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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