Hasta La Gadget!

RIM and its partner carriers have been promising BlackBerry 6 updates for a number of recent models, and Verizon’s getting a couple of the heavyweights out of the way today with the introduction of official upgrade packages for the Bold 9650 and Curve 3G 9330. In addition to universal search and an overall streamlined UI, one of the most important improvements here is the addition of RIM’s WebKit-based browser that makes hitting your favorite pages moderately less painful than before. Look for the update to become available at 8:00PM Eastern this evening, both online (see the Source links for instructions) and over-the-air.

Verizon offering BlackBerry 6 upgrades for Bold 9650 and Curve 3G tonight originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I wonder if any silly Facebook Mobile users actually called 911? If they did, I would love to here the recording. “Hello, 911. What’s your emergency?” “Err, Facebook told me to call.” Turns out that the these messages were Verizon’s fault, and Facebook made that pretty clear in its tweet. Oh, silly Verizon.

To all of those who have ever had a cell phone slip out of a pocket into a toilet or a bathtub or a sink, I say, take solace in the fact that it could have been worse–the thing could have been eaten by a prehistoric reptile. Gena, a crocodile in a Ukrainian aquarium, chomped down on a Nokia handset after a woman dropped in into a tank while attempting to take a picture.

While Apple’s iPad dominated tablet sales in 2010, there may be room for change in 2011. Enthusiasm for Android app development is rising fast in the coding community.

And that means the apps available to Android users is set to grow — fast.

A recent global survey of app developers by research firm IDC shows 74 percent of respondents as “very interested” in developing for upcoming Android OS-running tablets, up from 62 percent three months ago.

The survey, which questioned over 2,200 app developers around the world, cites the surge in new tablet debuts for 2011 as the reasoning for increased developer interest. At CES in January, manufacturers debuted 85 new tablets, the majority of which were running Android.

“My intuition is that Android is picking up that Linux, open-source crowd that feels excited to move from iOS development to an open platform,” Andreas Schobel, CTO of popular Android app developer Catch.com, told Wired.com in an interview. “The way you can weave Android applications together with Intents makes it a very sexy platform, but one that requires a lot more discipline and effort. Like a powerful, yet complicated, science kit.”

And they’ll be cranking out the apps at a breakneck pace. Respondents to the survey plan to develop an average of 6.5 apps in 2011, almost twice as many as last year. Apple’s App Store has over 400,000 apps currently available for download, while the Android Market offers around 200,000 apps.

2010 was Apple’s year to shine in the tablet market. In the company’s recent earnings report, Apple reported 7.33 million iPads sold in the fourth quarter of 2010. We’ve yet to see that type of traction from an Android tablet — Samsung reported sales of 1 million of its Galaxy Tab in December.

And the iPad still leads the tablet pack in terms of developer interest, with 87 percent of respondents expressing interest in it. But developers aren’t necessarily beholden to one specific platform. Those surveyed plan to develop apps for four different devices on average, the big four being the iPhone, iPad, Android phone and Android tablet.

Although the pack seems eager to produce more Android apps in the coming year, developers aren’t without their concerns. About half of the respondents expressed concerns around version fragmentation. Google has been in the habit of pushing two Android updates per year, which means multiple versions of software for developers to configure for multiple platform versions. Handset manufacturers tweaking the firmware for each model of phone can also be hell on a developers’ workload.

It’s the cost of doing business with an open platform like Android. And judging by IDC’s numbers, it’s a cost developers are willing to pay.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

See Also:

• Android Comes of Age at Google Developer Conference
• Android’s Rapid Growth Has Some Developers Worried
• Indie Coder Proves Android Apps Can Make Money, Too
• Google Muscles Android Developer, Offers Olive Branch
• Android Fragmentation Declines, But Older Versions Still Rule …
• Half of All Android Phones Now Sport Android 2.1

If Twitter has taught us anything (beyond what everyone we’ve ever met is doing at any one time), it’s the importance of dressing up your downtime. The company’s Fail Whale image has become synonymous with downtime–a welcome reprieve from the standard error messages (that is, at least, until we saw it for the 100th time in a week).