ReadWriteMobile

It pays to be mobile, if you want to reach the last-minute planners. According to Google 62% of restaurant related searches on Valentine's Day were from "high end mobile devices or tablets."

Something to think about for restaurants or other businesses that don't have mobile-friendly sites.

There should be a new bounty of dessert coming to Android lovers later this year. Android 5.0 "Jelly Bean" is rumored to be announced in the second quarter of 2012 and provide a better operating system for Android tablets. The report comes from Digitimes, a Taiwanese tech site that specializes on reporting rumors for the supply chain of the world's upcoming gadgets. Like any publication that specializes in rumors, Digitimes is wrong more often than it is right, but the timeline for Android 5.0 lines up with what Google has released in the past.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was officially announced in Q2 2011 at Google's I/O developer conference. Google I/O is scheduled this year for June 27-29 in San Francisco, right at the end of Q2. It is unlikely that Google will start shipping Jelly Bean at the same time, more likely waiting until the beginning of Q4 before the first flagship devices are announced.

If you think the smartphone you own today makes you more worldly, more cosmopolitan, then take a good look at this five-color geopolitical world map as perceived by BrowserRank.com. Using data compiled from StatCounter's latest projections of mobile operating system usage country-by-country (the firm detects browser usage, and then backtracks from there to decipher mobile OS), BrowserRank paints most of the world cyan. Cyan, it turns out, is for Symbian.

Whenever user privacy comes into question, the reaction is predictable. The tech media will flare up with outrageous and accusatory headlines, the mainstream media will pick up on it and put a couple talking heads on air to decry the practice and users will start talking in bars about how "company xyz" is spying on them. If we are lucky, the controversy will get tech writers sniping at each other and there will be a Congressional investigation.

Everybody is armed, forces are deployed and the battleground is chosen. Let's get this thermonuclear war started.

2011 was the year that the major mobile platform providers loaded up with ammunition in the upcoming world war between Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Google. Apple acquired patents from Novell while the "Rock Star" group of RIM, Microsoft and Apple won the majority of Nortel's patents. Google went big and bought everything that Motorola owned. We know all of this already. But, that was just the staging area. The real test will be in 2012. On Monday, the United States Department of Justice approved all of those acquisitions in one fell swoop.

Steve Jobs promised to go "thermonuclear" on Android over patent violations. That seems to be a dying wish that Apple is willing to pursue. Now that the big guns are out, what will be the consequence to the mobile ecosystem? Will the arms race force a détente, powerful patent portfolios canceling each other out? Or is this the beginning of disruptive lawsuits that ultimately becomes harmful to consumers looking for choice?

Did you know that a tenth of all laptops will eventually be stolen? That is a depressing thought. Mine was stolen many years ago from the trunk of my car, parked in a suburban shopping mall lot. Or that half of you keep passwords and other personal information on your laptops? These and other stats come from a study from Kensington, maker of anti-theft devices.

If there were any uncertainty that Google's acquisition of Motorola would be approved by regulatory agencies across the world, one only has to look at the fourth quarter of 2011 to see why it never was in danger. The last quarter of 2011 showed us which companies really control the smartphone market and Motorola was certainly not one of them. Between Apple and Samsung, the two behemoths controlled 95% of mobile phone profits worldwide, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley.

The pincer formation at the top of the ecosystem means that no regulatory agency can deny Google its $12.5 billion purchase. Life has also become extremely difficult for all the other OEMs and mobile platforms trying to make a dent in the market. If you are not making an iDevice or some type of Galaxy product, Apple and Samsung are squeezing you out of the market. The clock is ticking.

For many coders, developing an app is a labor of love. Hacking SDKs and APIs and making a beautiful and functional user interface is a challenge that many developers relish. Like everybody else though, developers need to eat. To eat, one needs to make money. Herein lays the problem for many developers trying to put together mobile HTML5 Web apps: there are no simple avenues to monetization.

HTML5 development studio appMobi wants to change that, especially for game developers. Today, the company announced playMobi, a cross-platform HTML5-based game development, deployment and monetization software developer kit. playMobi facilitates in-app purchasing, analytics and social constructs for game developers.

The term "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" or "RAND" (which may or may not include the "F" for "fair," depending on one's whim) was evidently coined long before any group of people came to a mutual decision upon what constituted "reasonable." At any rate, the debate over what's reasonable and what's "F" has now gone full-throttle, with Google's revelation Wednesday that it perceives prospective partner Motorola Mobility's (MMI) definition as reasonable enough, and that it's 2.25% of retail sale price minus subsidies.

That might not sound like much, but if you compound all the essential patents for which a manufacturer may need to obtain a license just to produce an ordinary smartphone, the sum total may become quite a chunk. That's the argument Apple made to European telecom regulators last November, in a letter revealed only last Tuesday. With Apple and Google now on the record, Microsoft could not afford to be left out of the discussion.

One more thing ... what will it be this time around? Apple's so-called iPad 3 is said to be announced in the first week of March and the rumor mill thinks it has pretty much nailed what the device will entail. A higher resolution screen, faster processor, better battery and a quality camera all packed in the same 9.7-inch form factor running iOS 5. Is it a technological marvel of the mobile revolution or just another ho-hum iteration from Apple?

If you are a device specification geek, the lusty deets from the iPad 3 are likely to excite you more Megan Fox announcing she is coming back for Transformers 9: The Rise and Fall of Prime set in the year 0001 A.D. during the height of the Roman Empire. If not, well, you might be out of luck with the iPad 3. It is hard to get pumped up for a device that, in reality, will be a nominal upgrade over the already great iPad 2. That is why I am waiting for the "one more thing" from the iPad 3. Are the iPad 3 rumors underwhelming? That is the topic of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.