The most recent AdMob Mobile Metrics Report states, "Requests from the Android Operating System increased 25% month over month.  Android has 5% worldwide OS share and pulled slightly ahead of Windows Mobile for the first time."

Since AdMob works with over 7,000 publishers, this finding’s hard to refute.  The chart below shows what sort of state the global mobile market is in, then.  Given another couple of months at its current growth rate, it seems possible that Android will catch up to the RIM operating system.

And here’s one other note: in case you’re curious about how Android’s doing in just the U.S., AdMob looked at that and pegs its share at an even more impressive nine percent.  This puts it behind only the RIM and iPhone operating systems (which control 14 and 64 percent of the market, respectively).

Anyway, a hat tip goes to Paul Boutin.

Adobe’s Max conference runs from October 4th through October 7th, so we can expect the release sometime between those dates.

Most of the "big boys" in the smartphone world are mentioned in the presentation: Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, WebOS and Symbian. Wait, there seems to be two smartphones missing… you know the one just sold over 1 million phones in three days. The other is very popular with business people, including the President of the United States. They both have fruit in the name.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry. Neither of the two seems to be getting Flash.

It seems that Apple doesn’t want to lose control of the app marketplace, which would definitely become more crowded if they began getting Flash & AIR apps.

As far as the other smartphones are concerned, Flash support is actually coming along a little faster than planned. Initially, the goal was to bring Flash to smartphones sometime in 2010… but with October release date, things are looking good for smartphone owners. (Except for the iPhone & Blackberry owners of course)

Let’s try to document the different existing relationships first.  In 2006, Google began to power MySpace’s search function.  In 2007, MySpace also joined Google’s OpenSocial developer initiative.  And on the other side of the equation, Microsoft gave $240 million in funding to Facebook.

Now, as a MySpace spokesperson explained in an email to WebProNews, "MySpace is building an integrated, mobile app for the next gen of Windows phones and will also allow MySpace developers to create engaging, custom OpenSocial apps using Silverlight."

So a wire or two definitely appears to have gotten crossed.  Nonetheless, this development sounds as if it’ll benefit Microsoft, MySpace, developers, and the average consumer.  Aber Whitcomb, MySpace’s CTO, stated, "Our relationship enables app developers to use Silverlight to create engaging MySpace apps and allows Windows Mobile users to have a more personal MySpace experience on their phone."

A discussion concerning betrayals and third cousins twice removed did not then follow.

This new app center will be at a disadvantage insofar as it’s a step behind the markets already operated by Apple, Google, and RIM, of course.  Depending on one’s point of view, then, Microsoft’s announcement might be more of a "please don’t forget us" than a "here’s what we’ve got cooking."

Still, 70 percent of apps’ sales revenue will go to developers, which is a competitive share.  Also, Microsoft promised in a statement that it will provide "transparency throughout the certification process, and guidance and support from the stage of development to the final sale to the consumer."  Which should beat Apple’s thumbs up/thumbs down approach.

Finally, even though there’s going to be an annual registration fee of $99, and every app submission within a year past the first five (which are free) will cost its developer an additional $99, this might prevent the sort of 43-options-for-fart-apps silliness that’s cropped up in other places.

It seems that Windows Marketplace for Mobile should be worth the wait for some developers, at least.

They wanted easier access to weather reports and expanded traffic coverage. The Live Search team pushed out those and other new toys for people on Windows Mobile platforms.

Gary Voronel, program manager for Live Search for mobile, talked about some of the new arrivals, in a post at the Live Search blog. A click of the Weather icon now brings up a four-day forecast, along with current conditions, he noted.

“By far the most often-requested feature,” he said.

Live Search of course does search on mobile, with the options for web, image, and other search types available to users. On the traffic side, Voronel cited Dallas, Indianapolis, and Baltimore among the cities added, courtesy of work done initially by Microsoft’s Live Search Maps group.

He also said there were plenty of requests for access to personalized content from the mobile community, which the team helped deliver with connections to community generated content in their Virtual Earth Collections as well as searching (gasp!) Google KML.

Voronel said in a followup to a comment that the new features require the .NET Compact Framework 2. After installing that, the user can put the Windows Mobile 6 version of Live Search on the device.

But first, Yahoo, HTC, and Microsoft want you to know how much they rock for doing this, and Legal wants to be clear that any product names used in the press releases are protected by United States intellectual property law. None of them, apparently, have read my rant about press release writing.

So here’s what’s going on, told to you as I translate on the fly the press release-ese:

Yahoo has a gamma version of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 available on Windows Mobile powered devices, a step that will change mobile Internet forever and ever, amen.

The following numbers are tricky, so please pay attention: It’s available on 75 Windows Mobile devices, 175 different mobile phone models, 100 of which are now in production.

"Consumers have been clamoring for us to bring Yahoo! Go 2.0 to Windows Mobile devices since we launched the service less than two months ago," exaggerated Marco Boerries, senior vice president of connected life, Yahoo!, who continue on for a while about the millions of people and devices in abject destitution without it, and how Yahoo has FINALLY brought "the open Internet to the mobile phone" for the first time ever.

John O’Rourke, general manager, Microsoft Corp. reiterates how exciting all of this is, and mentions that news, email, and photo sharing are now available on the go, accessible super fast by the power of Grey Skull.

The most important partner in this is HTC, the most amazing, stupendous, electrifying provider of Windows Mobile™-based smart devices there is. HTC’s devices will come preloaded with Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo oneSearch®, the combination of which acts as a kind of personal genie granting all of your wishes instantly.

Peter Chou, chief executive officer of HTC wants you to know he’s working for you and for you only, keeping your friends from dumping you because you’re too busy to hang out with them anymore. "With high resolution displays and breakthrough designs," he says, HTC’s products are the ideal platform for Yahoo! Go 2.0," and they’re really, really happy about it, times infinity plus one.

In addition to the aforementioned ecstasy, Yahoo! Go 2.0 for Windows Mobile offers other things sure to make your head explode into a million tiny bits like a Flickr Widget, a Local & Maps widget, and don’t forget the News, Sports, Entertainment, Weather, and finance widgets streaming news via RSS.

In a nutshell, it is because Mobile 5 saves to ROM instead of RAM, so that you don’t lose all your data when the battery dies.

The benefit of using ROM is obvious, since losing everything because you didn’t need the device for two weeks and didn’t charge it. Still, I wonder if there isn’t a better solution. If I had a smart phone with 64MB of memory, I’d rather back up the data to the two gig Mini SD card periodically and automatically than use slower ROM, although that seems like a pretty unreliable solution. I guess we’ll just have to take the slower speeds until ROM access speeds catch up to RAM, or something.

(via Bink)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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