> To date we’ve had 36,427 active beta testers and below you can see the massive variety of phones and Android OS versions everyone is running. We were really shocked to see the number of custom roms, crazy phones and general level of customization/hackalicious nature of Android. From our perspective it’s pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations. The charts that go along with the linked article above show just how fragmented the Android ecosystem is.

You can call it awesome, or you can call it a QA nightmare. I tend to think of it as a great reason not to develop for Android.

> Twitter will get to a billion members,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, said Monday, echoing a goal set by Facebook. Williams didn’t elaborate on a time frame. There are roughly 7 billion people on the planet. 1in 7 can’t possibly have Twitter accounts.

What Twitter will have soon is 1 billion accounts, which is not the same thing. I have two Twitter accounts. I know some people who have three or more.

Not saying 1 billion accounts isn’t impressive. But let’s be realistic here. And news outlets, how about pointing out obvious facts like this, rather than running Twitter’s spin machine verbatim.

October 20th, Apple gets “Back to the Mac.” Nice.

This should quiet those who have said that Apple doesn’t focus on the Mac enough. At least for a day or two.

Some are speculating already some new hardware to go along with this announcement. The only Mac really due for an update is the MacBook Air; I’m not sure if that would get rolled into this event or not. I’m guessing not, but it could go either way.

The real focus will be 10.7, of course. I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up for that. I expect a lot of design cues from recent iOS UI developments. Mail will get the iOS Mail look and feel, for sure. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. But considering how long Apple has let OS X sit still, I think they have to have at least something pretty big to say, or else why have a special event at all?

> [Microsoft](http://crunchgear.com/tag/Microsoft), ostensibly, is trying to break us of this habit and I say ostensibly because, if you really look at the [Windows Phone 7](http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/10/11/the-windows-phone-7-launch-our-take/) UI, you’re actually dealing with more swipes and taps than you’d expect given the sparse interface they are presenting. Sure, the phones are fast and the UI, at times, is strikingly beautiful, but it’s still a phone and, as such, requires lots of attention. Many opinions floating around about the new Windows Phone 7 ad campaign. This article from Mobile Crunch is correct in noting that while the new OS from Microsoft isn’t going to actually solve the problem of the “face down culture” Microsoft is smart to target this audience anyway.

Take a look at the market, and you can quickly see that Microsoft’s best shot for success is with first-time smartphone buyers. Apple iPhone users are loyal the extreme, so much so that they stick with crappy service just to keep their precious iPhones. So you’ll never get them. Blackberry users are hard-core business users, and although Microsoft has a strong customer base there as a company, this new OS is largely lacking the security features and overall business appeal necessary for that group. Android users are mostly one year into a two-year contract. (Remember, the explosive growth of Android in the US all happened in the last 12 months.) So it would be financially painful to leave your Android phone, even if you wanted to. So that leaves people who have never had a smartphone before.

And there are lots of people in that situation. Tech geek that I am, I have lots more friends and family members who don’t have a smartphone than have iPhones or Android phones. And while many of those people haven’t taken the plunge to a smartphone mostly because of the financial commitment (something that Windows Phone 7 won’t help), many have also expressed a discontent with the seeming obsession of people like myself with my phone. They don’t want to “become a slave” to their phones. Many of them avoided getting mobile phones in the first place until it became absolutely socially unacceptable not to have one. These are the “late adopters,” the people who get dragged kicking and screaming into the next technological wonders. And they are a big group.

They also won’t care at all about the lack of “cut and paste.”

So while the ads may be largely deceptive in the sense that Windows Mobile 7 will not fundamentally reduce your “face down” time, from a marketing standpoint, this is actually a pretty smart campaign.

Just as the DROID marketing campaign succeeded by appealing only to the relatively small market of supergeeks (much to my surprise and chagrin), these Microsoft ads will specifically appeal only to the much larger group of non-supergeeks. Like everything else Microsoft has done with Windows Phone 7 so far, I think this is a smart tactic.

> In the end, what Logitech unveiled is just a beginning. These are baby steps, and early adopters will pay for being first on the bandwagon. Yes, there’s a need for unifying the disparate content sources. The question still remains, though, how well that disparate content can be unified. This may be a tougher challenge than even Google can tackle. After all, even 20 years after reunification, Germany retains some of its long-standing divisions. The chaos in the living room may prove to insurmountable barriers, too. $300 makes this device a non-starter. Having a keyboard in my living room makes it a non-starter. This thing is weaker than the Apple TV was three years ago, and people are talking about it as if Google is going to take over the world tomorrow.

I like Logitech products in general. But the whole concept of the Google TV is flawed from the start. No one wants to surf the web on a TV. We want to watch shows and movies. Period. And that can’t be done any better than it is now until someone takes the Cable companies out to pasture. And we all know how likely that is.

This product literally offers nothing that a cheap mini-computer hooked up to your tv can’t do. The five people (including myself) who were going to do that have already done it. So who is the audience for this thing?