The Mobile Fun Blog

Motorola has been fighting hard to reestablish itself as the giant mobile phone maker it once was. The new wave of Android phones – like the Motorola Droid and Devour – prove that Moto’s well on its way back to prominence, but the company’s fight is a long way from over. As such, co-CEOs Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha have voluntarily agreed to take a 25% pay cut for 2010. The move will have the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) co-chiefs continuing salary reductions made in 2009.

FunMobility is America’s largest mobile content community, used by 27 different companies, and on 550 handsets. With almost 76,700,000 customers, when the team announces something, people listen. Enter FunTweet, a Twitter client that adds images to one’s tweet based on keywords found within the tweet.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Now that buzz about Apple’s patent lawsuit against HTC has quieted a bit, I’m ready to pipe in with some contrarian analysis. I agree with other pundits suggesting that the lawsuit is competition by litigation, where Apple hopes to scare off mobile manufacturers from licensing Android. Surely some handset manufacturers will pull back, but they would be foolish to do so. For other existing and potential Android licensees, the lawsuit is a get out of jail free card. Apple’s patent case should embolden, not restrain them. There may never be a better time to license Android than now.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

One of Microsoft’s major justifications for the Yahoo search deal is scale. CEO Steve Ballmer has repeatedly asserted that greater scale would allow Microsoft to improve search accuracy. Just last week he told Search Marketing Expo West attendees: “The ability to put together Yahoo’s volumes and Microsoft’s volumes and use that in a way that improves the experience more, let’s call it all involved parties, we think is absolutely fantastic.”

Samsung is on top of the world this morning because it had the most market share in the United States for 2009 and Brand Keys said the company topped its customer loyalty survey for wireless handsets.

While the iPhone, BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) and Android smartphones take up a lot of the conversation, Samsung is the world’s second-biggest handset maker because of its large portfolio of low-end and feature phones. They do make some solid devices, and the study found customers really liked their Samsung cell phones.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Different modes of travel often require different routes to be taken. If you’re walking somewhere, for example, you’re not likely to take a highway to get there, and you have the distinct advantage of being able to go through certain structures that cars cannot. The same goes for biking. When someone is planning to get somewhere by bike, they’re going to demand different routes. This is why the Google Maps team today announced that it has added bicycling directions to Google Maps.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Tuesday evening, during an event televised over YouTube called Google Campfire One, Google executives lifted the curtain on its cloud-based Apps Marketplace for PC-based applications, with the promise of opening its online store with 50 charter vendors later in the evening. The Marketplace is designed to feature applications that integrate with the company’s existing Google Apps, Gmail, and other cloud-based services.

Get ready for some gaming Android fans, as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has just released the latest version of the native development kit and it gives developers the tools to make games that look as good as those on the iPhone.

The third NDK, known as Revision 3 or r3, gives developers access to OpenGL ES 2.0, which “brings the ability to control graphics rendering vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language.” Basically, this means good-looking 3D graphics. It’s the same tool that iPhone developers get with the iPhone 3GS, and this leads to some noticeably improved performance and visuals. It will only be available for Android 2.0 or higher devices.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Should the next version of HTML, the Web standard that embodies how pages are laid out and constructed, include explicit specifications for inline, 2D dynamic graphics? There’s valid arguments on both sides. One side believes that the ability to plot charts and animations would have been part of the original HTML standard anyway, had the technology existed on the back end in the beginning; giving HTML 2D graphics now, they say, plugs a hole left open for too long. Another believes the HTML5 standard should simply specify an API for plug-ins, to let separate groups of engineers evolve a methodology for plotting graphics at their own pace, and on their own track.

When it comes to mobile internet search, alliances are short-lived and loyalties are looser than, well, you get the point. AT&T (NYSE: T) recently kicked Google (NSDQ: GOOG) off the Android-powered Motorola BackFlip, in order to get in bed with Yahoo as the default search engine on the smartphone. Now, T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) USA has up and shuffled Google out the door to make space for Yahoo. The two-year agreement between Yahoo and T-Mobile is apparently no more, and the fourth-largest US wireless carrier is looking elsewhere for mobile search. That elsewhere is Google.