Spurred by the recently announced Amazon Kindle Fire and its $199 price, Apple is rumored to be exploring a new low-cost iPad for release in the first few months of 2012. Analyst Brian White with Ticonderoga Securities has been touring China and Taiwan and meeting with component suppliers, where he has heard rumblings of a so-called “iPad mini” arriving next year. The “mini” name doesn’t necessarily refer to the size of the device, he said, but a lower entry-level price. He said such a device is expected to arrive…

Vendors are trying to figure out what works when it comes to screen sizes, according to Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.One of the big product trends at IFA was screen sizes between 4.5 inches and 5.5 inches, which include the LTE version of Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S II, HTC’s Windows Phone-based Titan, Samsung’s Galaxy Note and the Tablet P from Sony, which has two 5-inch screens. via Macworld It’s fun to watch all these other companies just now get around to performing the…

> The high-level talks between Google and Motorola started about five weeks ago. Google CEO Larry Page and Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha were talking directly, and only a handful of executives were brought into discussions. Our sources suggest that Android co-founder Andy Rubin was brought into the talks only very recently. via [gigaom.com](http://gigaom.com/2011/08/15/guess-who-else-wanted-to-buy-motorola/)Like I said earlier, this move was more about defense than any sort of long-term mastermind plan, as suggested by the delusional Dan Lyons. The short span of time suggests…

> And today it all makes sense. Google just sandbagged its rivals. The whole thing was a rope-a-dope maneuver. Google never cared about the Nortel patents. It just wanted to drive up the price so that AppleSoft (those happy new bedmates) would overpay. Today, with the Motorola deal, Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel. More important, Google just raised the stakes in a huge way for anyone who wants to stay in the smartphone market. > > Better yet, Google got its rivals…

During a keynote presentation at Google’s IO developer conference last year, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra proclaimed that the search giant created Android in order to bring freedom to the masses and avoid a “draconian future” in which one company controlled the mobile industry. Looking past the self-congratulatory rhetoric, Android’s poor track record on openness is becoming harder to ignore. The company revealed Thursday that it will delay publication of the Android 3.0 source code for the foreseeable future—possibly for months. It’s not clear…