As cell phones continue to become more and more like what we used to know as a PC, we’ll start to see more of the problems crop up that the PC faced. Chief among, it’s becoming clear, is fragmentation. With the advent of operating systems like Android and Windows Phone 7, handset manufacturers are increasingly under pressure to put out better handsets.

With the iPhone, everyone has the same hardware, and because Apple earns profits from both the hardware and the software and controls the production of both, there’s no real rush to make a new handset. The hardware manufactures for Android and WP7, on the other hand, are in a sort of arms race. Every month it seems there’s a newer, faster Droid on the market. Something with a better camera. Something that runs Flash. Something with more RAM. Something better. That race is leading to a serious fragmentation, at least with Android, and it’s affecting the user experience.

Angry Birds has become one of the most popular games across several mobile platforms, but the developer has struggled to keep its product functional on all Android devices. The developer, Rovio Mobile, said that it will be creating a second version of the game for lower-end Android handsets, citing “severe performance issues.” While this isn’t a huge issue now, imagine two years down the road when there will be ever more hundreds of thousands of apps and a marketplace cluttered with new and old handsets. It will be a mess.

Of course Apple isn’t totally exempt from this issue. Its own handsets have changed significantly year after year, giving way to some high-performance applications that simply won’t run on the original iPhone or even the iPhone 3G. As time wears on, though, I would expect Apple will see significantly less fragmentation than the operating systems with secondary hardware manufacturers. There have been rumors though, that Apple is creating an iPhone “Lite” as well as the current iPhone 4 and a CDMA version of the phone for Verizon. Sounds an awful lot like fragmentation to me.

You don’t have to be an iPhone developer to make a bunch of money from mobile applications. Take Edward Kim’s Car Locator. The free version of the app has been downloaded 70,000 times, while nearly 7,000 have picked up the paid version. Total revenue? How bout $13,000 a month.

Sure, it’s not the millions you’ve heard about in the App Store, but Kim has just one among a couple hundred “top” applications that are likely grossing at least as much as his if not more. The app had always done well, but it really took off when it was added to the featured list on the Android Marketplace. “it was netting an average of about $80 – $100/day,” Kim wrote on his blog, “until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day.”

Almost $800 for something that probably didn’t take all that long to code? Why do I write again?

Source: Eddie Kim

Google has been notoriously quiet about the number of apps available in the Android Marketplace. After this week’s announcement that the mobile OS has 20,000 available apps, the search giant stepped in to set the record straight. As it turns out, there are just over 16,000 apps available, not that 20k AndroLib reported.

Google contacted TechCrunch with the updated stats, and mentioned that it was looking at new ways to disclose information about marketplace growth to consumers. Google wouldn’t confirm the ratio of paid to free apps. AndroLib claims the discrepancy is because Google is only counting the apps available to US customers, or not including anything since the end of November. I’d guess the former, since it’s highly unlikely 4,000 apps have been added in 16 days time.

Source: TechCrunch

There should be no remaining doubt that 2010 is Android’s year. The mobile OS will finally have some compelling handsets, and we’re likely to see exponential growth in global adoption. This latest bit of news will certainly make Android look a little better for consumers. The Android Marketplace has hit 20,000 apps.

True, the iPhone has over 100,000, but that’s not really what Google is after. There will be a few people here and there that avoid the iPhone like the plague, but Google will really be poaching market share from companies like Nokia and Microsoft. It’s going to be a while before Google is competing directly with Apple in the mobile market, but the data giant is rushing toward that goal at about the same pace Apple did when the App Store blew up. It’s taken just five months since the 20,000 app marker. We could see 40,000 as early as April 2010.

If one thing still stands in Google’s way, it’s the wide variation in handset hardware. That’s still something that makes Android less attractive than the iPhone OS, where just about everything is controlled. The Nexus One can serve as a sort of roadmap for manufacturers, but it is by no means the gold standard for a perfect phone. Google is also using the phone to flout American cellular practices, a gamble that will likely end in very low adoption rates for the handset unless it’s subsidized some other way.

Source: AndroLib

Remember that free Photoshop app for the iPhone? Adobe’s finally released a version for Android, roughly a month after the iPhone version became available.

It’s basically the same app, though with a few differences for both better and worse. For starters, the Android version displays the phone’s entire photo library within the application. With the iPhone version you have to go through an extra step to select your photo. Not a huge difference, but it’s nice.

On the flipside, the Android version doesn’t have the pinch or twist functionality for straightening out your pictures. The feature is still there, just as a menu item instead of the multitouch. Again, not a big deal, and frankly the Photoshop app probably won’t be the pivotal factor if you’re deciding between the two platforms. For either OS, it’s a nice app.