Samsung Tab 10.1 (right) is lighter and thinner than the iPad 2 (Photo by Larry Magid)
San Francisco — Day one of the annual Google I/O developer’s was all things Android. The day began with a recap of Android’s growth in the two and a half years it’s been on the market. Google says that there are now 100 million activated Android devices, 400,000 new devices activated every day, 200,000 apps in the Android market and that Android users have so far downloaded and installed 4.5 billion apps. Those numbers aren’t as gargantuan as what Apple can claim, but they’re respectable and indicate enormous growth for the only serious competitor to Apple’s popular iOS operating system that runs on iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices.
The company announced update to Honeycomb, the version of Android optimized for tablets but also said that later this year they’ll ship a new version of the operating system, called Ice Cream Sandwich, that supports both phones and tablets. The just released Honeycomb 3.1 adds resizable widgets and a new task switcher. Google also announced an update to its Google TV platform which will soon run applications from the Android marketplace. For more on the specs and the whys, more in depth on HuffPost.
Larry Magid is a technology journalist and an Internet safety advocate. He serves as on-air technology analyst for CBS News, is co-director of ConnectSafely.org and founder of SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com. He also writes columns that appear on CNET News, CBSNews.com, Huffington Post and the San Jose Mercury News.
His technology reports can be heard daily on CBS News and CBS affiliates throughout the U.S. and he has a daily tech segment on KCBS radio in San Francisco. He’s a regular contributor to BBC World Service and an occasional guest on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. He is often called upon for commentary by CBS television news, CNN and Fox News and has appeared on the CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight, the Today Show and CBS Early Show. He has also been a frequent contributor to the New York Times and was, for 18 years, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
He has written several books including the best-selling Little PC Book and is co-author (with Anne Collier) of MySpace Unraveled.
Larry served on the Obama Administration’s Online Technology Working Group and the Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technology Task Force.
