Take the new Sony Xperia ZR, for example, which is a smaller version of the company’s flagship Xperia Z. This 4.6-inch 720p device is not only safe from accidental drops in water, but it can be used to capture full HD video while submerged. Don’t get all Jacques Cousteau with it though: The Xperia ZR is only rated for depths of 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. Still, it’s an amazing design feature and shows just how far smartphone hardware is maturing in general.

The current market isn’t just about features though. Nearly every flagship phone released this year to date shares most, if not all of the same hardware components. With 1080p displays, Qualcomm Snapdragon S600 processors, and the latest wireless technologies supported, purchasing choices could be influenced more by phone design. Sure, there are also Android skins and services to consider, but I can’t think of any time in history when nearly every flagship phone had such smart design.

Take the HTC One, for example. With it’s curved metal body and super build quality, it’s a sure standout from the many plastic phones on the market. My colleague, Om Malik — an iPhone user that never met an Android phone he liked — actually for the first time considered buying Android phone after seeing the One. (Don’t worry Apple fans, Om hasn’t defected: He still doesn’t own an Android!).

Need more examples? Sony’s Xperia Z — the big brother of the new ZR — is stunning as well with a 5-inch full HD screen and no hardware buttons on the front face. The side-mounted power button is a design stand-out as is the 7.9 millimeter thinness. It too impressed Om.

Samsung’s new Galaxy S 4 is arguably a hardware let-down for many, yet it still impresses me that the company could cram a larger, high-resolution panel in a phone that looks like the Galaxy S 3, but is essentially a smaller device. LG’s Optimus G Pro shares similar features and components with all of the above yet feels and looks like a much-improved Galaxy Note 2. All of these are light-years better than my original ugly duckling — the Nexus One — when it comes to design.

I’m not suggesting that any of these phones is “best” or that you should opt for a flagship device over a lower-priced smartphone. Instead, my point is this: With so few top-tier hardware component suppliers, most high-end handsets share a similar feature-set. There may be subtle differences — which has a better camera sensor or maybe support for that new 802.11ac Wi-Fi — but most of these phones offer similar experiences.

Up to this point, hardware makers put more effort to differentiate with Android skins, services or other software functions. These days, design is becoming more prominent. For consumers looking for their next flagship Android phone, that’s a great problem to have.

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Now Shuttleworth, who used tens of millions of his own dollars to fund Canonical and made it his ambition to entrench Ubuntu Linux on desktops and servers is now launching a full-on assault to put it on your smartphone, your tablet and the computers that run your favorite cloud services via OpenStack.

Taking on the giants

It’s a gutsy bet. He’s basically taking on Google’s Chrome Browser, ChromeOS and Android OS. And then there’s iOS. Not a job for the faint of heart. In a recent interview with GigaOM,  Shuttleworth said a key Ubuntu advantage is that its basic code really does run everywhere from itty-bitty mobile devices to big iron. No Android-Chrome OS divide here.

“The core of Ubuntu that runs on the server is the same as on the phone and that’s a wonderful resonance,” Shuttleworth said. “We’ve done  pioneering work to put server Linux on ARM chips and the core of those ARM chips is the same for servers as it is for smartphones,”  Shuttleworth said.

Admittedly, it’s still early days for running ARM servers in a production environment — my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported that Baidu is doing it — for storage — but few others are. But the need for energy-sipping servers is not going away. And ARM servers address that demand.

As more cloud services get delivered via smartphones and tablets, all that “resonance” could come in handy. But timing may be a problem. Android and Apple iOS, which dominate that smartphone and tablet market now, will be hard to dislodge. If you believe Google Chairman Eric Schmidt — a biased observer — Android Android’s growth rate is, is on track to hit 1 billion downloads within the next 6 to 9 months. And, to further complicate matters, Microsoft seems willing to spend big to build its presence in smartphones and tablets as well. As much money as Shuttleworth has, Microsoft has more.

Seemingly undaunted, Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is getting serious looks from silicon providers, from carriers and from handset makers who are interested in offering it on their devices. He declined to provide names. It is true that Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile assets still worries third-party handset makers who don’t relish the thought of competing with their OS provider, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed Android adoption.

Ubuntu shows strength in cloud

Ubuntu is already a big presence in the cloud by virtue of Amazon Web Services where it is the most popular operating environment on EC2 — at least as measured by the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that people create. “The number of AMIs running Ubuntu is 5 or 6 times as many as Windows or any other operating system,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with Redmonk. One caveat is that people create lots of AMIs that they may not actually use, cautioned The 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks.

And Ubuntu came earlier than many other vendors to the OpenStack party. It’s got a leg up in the enterprise two years ago when  HP named it the lead host and guest OS in HP’s OpenStack cloud. That relationship continues to this day.

Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu’s OpenStack gets tons of interest from telcos and carriers that are rushing to create their own cloud services to better compete with AWS. One theme coming out of the OpenStack Summit last month was that these sleeping giants, many of which offer VMware vCloud Director options that price them out of the market, are finally waking up to the threat that AWS poses to them. And that is something Shuttleworth feels Ubuntu, with Canonical behind it,  can capitalize on.

“We are in a very good position when carriers want to look beyond standing up OpenStack to what the end-user experience is,” he said.

In his view, Ubuntu more than other Linux OpenStack flavors, offers simplicity and power — a claim that other OpenStack players would likely dispute. Linux rivals Red Hat, SUSE and are also all in the mix here. And Nebula’s selling point is its OpenStack controller that makes it easy to plug OpenStack into existing legacy environments. There will be a ton of competition among the OpenStack providers even as they all contend with CloudStack and Eucalyptus options.

Shuttleworth maintains Ubuntu’s advantage, however.

“We really are at the point where you can take a USB with Ubuntu, stick it on 1 to 300 servers and in a short period have a high-availability cloud — compute, storage, and network — up and running that provides a lot of value,” he said. “This is real and it’s helping people get over the conceptual hurdle of moving to cloud. It’s at the point where you can have ten people debating it for a week or you can just go and do it — the cost is low enough and the lessons are valuable enough to make it happen.”

But what about revenue?

There’s one not-so-small hitch here. As many good reviews as Ubuntu Linux has gotten, the revenue or profit picture is about as clear as mud. Canonical’s business model is that customers pay for support and maintenance on free software. But the privately held company won’t say how many people actually pay for any of that. And it doesn’t talk about how much money Shuttleworth has ponied up since founding the company in 2004. The question is whether Canonical (and Ubuntu) could stand on its own without his deep pockets. Face it, it’s hard to take a customer from free to non-free.

When it comes to questions about revenue or profitability, Canonical will only say that customers including PC, phone and tablet manufacturers and big companies that deploy Ubuntu at scale  use Canonical’s paid tools and services to support their server, cloud and client environments.

That may not be enough detail for enterprise buyers who want to know if the vendor they use today will be around next year or the year after. For a company that has such grand plans for a free operating system, Canonical needs to address these questions at some point.

Shuttleworth will be talking about his grand cloud vision at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in London in September, so here’s your chance to ask.

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AT&T says you’ll get a minimum credit of $100 and if the phone is worth more, it will increase the credit accordingly. Once the smartphone is turned in and evaluated, customers can use the credit immediately in three ways: “towards an accessory purchase, apply it to an existing bill, or even donate it to AT&T’s charitable cause Cell Phones for Soldiers.” As long as the phone is no more than three years old and in good working condition, AT&T will accept it. (Maybe I’ll dig out my old Palm Pre!) According to an AT&T representative, it will even take phones from other carriers.

These deals reinforce that the cellular market is all about the services and ongoing revenue per user. Carriers generally don’t make money on hardware sales unless contract customers continue using their hardware after the contract period. T-Mobile is the exception to that rule, having branded itself the “uncarrier” and by separating the cost of hardware and services: Once you pay your hardware off with T-Mobile, your monthly bill is reduced to just the service plan.

I won’t say that AT&T just completely trumped Sprint’s $100 deal, but it’s likely going to take the wind of Sprint’s promotion. AT&T currently has LTE service in far more areas than Sprint. And even better — if you use AT&T’s network, that is — fallback service drops to HSPA+ which can be nearly as fast as LTE. Sprint’s fallback outside of LTE is EV-DO service, topping out around 1.5 Mbps.

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As these companies battle for the top spot, it’s interesting to note which competitors aren’t on the top five smartphone shipments list. Namely: HTC, BlackBerry and Nokia, all of which were on the list together as recently as the last quarter of 2011. Now it’s LG, Huawei and ZTE that round out the top five after Samsung and Apple.

It should be noted that Apple is the only vendor that reports sales and not shipments, but even that fact doesn’t support the idea that Apple outsold Samsung. It’s simply not a reasonable expectation that Samsung has 33.3 million smartphones sitting around in inventory worldwide.

Unless Samsung stumbles in a big way, it’s not likely that another Android handset maker will outsell Apple’s iPhone any time soon. For all intents and purposes, Samsung is the de facto Android standard, having built a huge audience with its line of Galaxy smartphones. This strategy started in 2010 and, as we pointed out in mid-2011, Samsung was poised to become the smartphone king. Let’s see how long it keeps the crown.

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The Atom is made of two parts: a small generator with electronic power regulation and a removable battery pack with a USB port.  Most bicycles with a quick-release rear wheel can use the Atom, which sits between the rear tire and bike frame. A USB cable can be run from the Atom to a charge a mobile device while riding, even as the battery pack recharges. Here’s how it works:

Taking the Atom’s battery pack with you when leaving your bike is a snap; just remove it when you lock up your bike. I like the fact that the battery pack pulls “double duty”: You can recharge it through a conventional outlet as well. With a 1300 mAh battery capacity, a fully-charged Atom should recharge an iPhone to about 70 percent full. Handsets with larger batteries — say the new Galaxy S 4, for example — would only get about 40 to 50 percent of a recharge with the Atom.

The project is hoping to raise $85,000 by May 23 and it’s well on its way already: At time of writing, over $55,000 were pledged. The first 300 early-birds already committed a discounted $85 for the Atom, so if you want in now, you’ll have to fork over $95. The project founders expect to sell the Atom for $105, so you can still get a discount now. Delivery estimates for the Atom are November.

Are there cheaper ways to recharge your devices? Of course there are. But this product is perfect for heavy bike commuters. And when I take weekend rides, I often use my phone to track the ride via GPS so I can get speed, elevation and other data. The apps and radios to make that happen aren’t kind to my phone batteries, so the Atom would be a great companion for those activities too.

This post was updated at 6:11am, April 26, to accurately reflect the product name.

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All three devices offer the basic, native Android experience, just like Google’s Nexus phone line. That could appeal to many who prefer Android’s user interface over HTC’s Sense or Samsung’s TouchWiz interfaces, for example. Of course, at this price, you won’t get the hardware that’s inside a Google Nexus flagship. The internal components aren’t bad for the price, but you won’t find support for LTE. Instead, all three devices use 3G/HSPA networks with download speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.

For $99, the entry-level Archos 35 Carbon gets you a 3.5-inch IPS display with low 360 x 480 resolution. Internal memory is just 4 GB, which can be expanded with up 32 GB on a microSD card. The Android 4.0 device runs on a 1 GHz Qualcomm 7225A chip and includes aGPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 and can be a hotspot. The two cameras — front and rear — only capture VGA quality images.

The $219 Archos 50 Platinum is a 5-inch handset with 960 x 540 resolution and IPS screen, running Android 4.1.2. The Platinum gets a big performance boost over the Carbon with a quad-core Qualcomm 8225Q running at 1.2 GHz paired with 1 GB of memory. Internal memory still tops out at 4 GB but can be expanded with removable storage. The same connectivity options from the Carbon are here. The two cameras, however, get a vast improvement: 8 megapixel on the rear camera with 720p video capture and 2 megapixels on the front.

An additional $30 moves you up to the Archos 53 Platinum at $249. A cursory scan of the specs shows me that the $30 gets you a larger version of the Archos 50 because the specs appear to be the same. The key difference is the screen, which is a 5.3-inch IPS panel using the same qHD resolution as the Archos 50. You do get a larger battery, however, than the slightly smaller, cheaper model.

Archos plans to begin selling the smartphones by the end of May in Europe. I haven’t seen any indication of whether the handsets will arrive in the U.S., but I suspect you can always order one from overseas if you want a low-cost, unlocked Android phone without a homescreen skin.

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According to a Los Angeles Times article about Monday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the FBI has collected 10 terabytes that it’s sifting through in order to seek out clues about what exactly happened and who did it. Maybe I’m just a techno-optimist, but I find this very reassuring.

According the Times, “The data include call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and surveillance footage collected by city cameras, local businesses, gas stations, media outlets and spectators who volunteered to provide their videos and snap shots.”

Lots of data means lots of potential value

It’s reassuring because I’ve spoken with so many smart people over the years who can do amazing things with data. Ten terabytes isn’t a huge data set by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plenty to work with if it’s of high quality. It’s very possible there are some needles in that haystack of call logs, and I’m optimistic the analysts within the FBI — possibly with some outside help — will be able to find them.

Techniques around video analysis and facial recognition are better than many people think, too. If there’s a way to stitch together hundreds — maybe thousands — of videos into a single truth of what happened, then I’m confident it will happen. By tracking faces and objects over time and place, we can recreate a crime and track down suspects without relying on after-the-fact accounts by witnesses who weren’t paying any attention until the bomb actually went off.

It’s not that witnesses are lying, it’s just that an attack like this might artificially color certain observations as being more nefarious than they really were. A Middle Easterner standing nearby might seem suspicious in hindsight, for example, but a witness might not have seen that guy cheering on a friend beforehand, stop to get a soda, and then meander over to the area where the bomb went off.

I have no clue what really happened, of course, I just know that cameras — especially hundreds of them at different angle and shooting over different timeframes — don’t suffer from selective or incomplete memories.

Can we crowdsource some surveillance?

I also find all this now-surveillance data reassuring because — if it proves useful — it might actually help to preserve our civil liberties going forward. We don’t necessarily needs drones flying overhead and cameras on every corner if we can crowdsource (at least from densely populated areas or big events) relatively high-resolution videos and photos during the investigation phase. We don’t necessarily need all orders of mobile call and location-tracking if we can collect what we need from the relevant area afterward.

This does little to prevent attacks, of course, and intelligence agencies will no doubt continue to trace phone calls and generally do what they do. That’s fine by me. If airports want to use facial recognition to flag known threats as they walk in the door, I’m not sure I can take issue with that either.

But by and large, it seems there’s precious little that surveillance — especially video — can do to predict crime unless an agency already knows what it’s looking for and has the means to act fast enough to make a difference. (IBM Fellow and general identity analytics guru Jeff Jonas wrote a great blog post in November about what’s actually possible to predict given the data on hand.)

So to the extent anyone thinks additional surveillance is going to help solve crimes that we didn’t see coming, I think I’d rather leave the data in the hands of hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses rather than a handful of city, state and federal governments that might be tempted to overstep the bounds of what’s acceptable.

Really, though, the notion of how to prevent terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crimes is a complex issue, and I’m not sure there are many ethically right or wrong answers. But when we get past the tragedy and criminality of what happened in Boston, we have to look at it as part of the bigger picture that’s shaping up around all the data we’re generating, collecting and analyzing. If terabytes of geospatially targeted call records and crowdsourced audio-video surveillance can help solve this type of crime and save all the time, money and privacy concerns of more-intrusive and expansive government efforts, then maybe there’s something worth considering.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Faraways.

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Some of the expected improvements, says the BBNews blog, are support for sending PIN-based text messages in the BlackBerry Hub, an update to the camera to support HDR photos, and BlackBerry Link, which is a way to browse data files on a remote computer. The blog, based in Poland, isn’t one I’ve followed prior, but the reported features don’t sound far-fetched. Even if these functions do arrive on BlackBerry 10 devices soon, they can’t come soon enough.

A survey by Raymond James, reported by AllThingsD on Thursday, show that 71 percent of survey participants would never use a BlackBerry. That compares to 31.3 percent who have no interest in using Android, while 19.7 percent say nothing would get them to buy an iPhone.

Additionally, analysts are starting to dig deeper in BlackBerry 10 sales figures and finding that return rates are rising. “In several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before,” noted analyst Detwiler Fenton in statement to Bloomberg. Fenton says the unintuitive interface is a barrier, which could be the case, although there are only a handful of gestures needed to use the phone in my experience.

The bigger issue in my mind? Marketing. I haven’t seen the type of media blitz on television or elsewhere that Samsung and Apple typically use to promote their products. Software improvements are welcome — as are more native apps from top-tier development shops — but even the best products on the planet will never reach their sales potential without good old marketing.

Update: BlackBerry is refuting the return figures and seeking government review of the analyst statements.

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Both devices share design cues with the new Samsung Galaxy S 4, so most of the differences are on the inside. Here’s a quick rundown of the specs on each:

The Galaxy Mega 5.8 uses a 960 x 540 display, 1.4 GHz dual-core chip, 8 GB of internal storage expandable up to another 64 GB, 1.5 GB of memory, a 2600 mAh battery and the typical assortment of wireless connectivity. Samsung’s Galaxy Mega 6.3 bumps the display to 720p resolution, uses a 1.7 GHz dual-core chip, 8 or 16 GB of internal storage plus the microSD slot, 1.5 GB of memory and a 3200 mAh battery. It also adds NFC and support for 802.11 a/c Wi-Fi, which the Mega 5.8 doesn’t have.

At this point, there are few screen sizes Samsung’s Galaxy brand doesn’t have covered. And while some disagree with the strategy of similar smartphones in a dizzying array of sizes, I can understand Samsung’s approach.

One of the appeals of the Android market as a whole is the choice of phone design and size. Samsung is not only taking over Android with its own TouchWiz interface, software and stores, but it mimics one of the best qualities of Android: a phone in the size that fits you best.

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