Recently I received Huawei Ideos U8150 phone for review. This is an Android smartphone meant for the entry level market. I had the phone for a few weeks to put it through its paces and here are some of my thoughts about it. I am not going to expand a lot on the general Android points as we all know about it but will concentrate succinctly and to-the-point on the aspects which can make it or break it for this phone against its competition in the similar price ranges.

Google just released the latest version of its Music app  that ties into its cloud player service Music Beta. This brings the version upto 3.0.1 and adds a lot of fixes, crashes a lot less and now even works on Samsung Galaxy S with Gingerbread which was broken earlier. If you are outside the US and not able to download the app from the market, then download it from here:http://www.multiupload.com/KIM5LQDL0K

Google just launched an encrypted search portal which is a Godsend for people on public networks since there is a lot that can be gleaned from your search queries. For doing your protected searches, however, you have to go to a different portal which I linked to above. Now, the omnibar (the address bar in Google Chrome) also serves as a search box but searches on the normal google portal by default. Here is a simple, few seconds process to switch it over to encrypted search.

It was just about an year ago that we heard about the $35 Android Tablet from India which would revolutionize the education in developing countries. Mr. Kapil Sibal promoted it with utmost fervor until it was found that the BoM itself of the tablet was more than $50 and none of the guys claimed to have “invented” it even knew about its existence until a few days before the announcement. Ultimately, it was discovered that the tablet was just a rebranded chinese import which the government wanted to bring down to $35 price point by subsidizing the cost and not by somehow inventing cheaper parts. What more proof can we get about it’s non existence that it hasn’t materialized after so much of time and even the company that was supposed to be making it according to the government (HCL) has said that it has nothing to do with it.

Now, this is mind blowing. I’ve just talked to a pretty reliable source within the Android ranks of Google that Google is going to distance itself legally from Android and spin it off in a separate company. The source said that the move can happen very soon and may be announced at Google I/O conference in May. Although details are sketchy and only very few high profile folks know about it within Google, my source says that the probable reason is increasing worries about legal aspects of Android with respect to Patents and IP law suits. Google also doesn’t want to be held responsible by any of the OEMs using Android when they are targeted by these law suits. So, they arrived at this decision to create a win-win situation where the new company will still be handed over instructions from MountainView through back channels but liabilities of the company are going to be very limited because they will show zero or no earnings at all.