Hasta La Gadget!

When Apple asks a favor, people listen–even if those people happen to run Google and are getting ready to launch an iPhone competitor. Venture Beat is reporting that, as Google was designing Android, Apple requested that the company not include that old iPhone favorite, multi-touch, in the open-source mobile OS. And as anyone with a T-Mobile G1 can guess, Google agreed.

Android team members, for their part, are seemingly satisfied with the agreement for two reasons. First, it staves off a potentially litigious Apple, which owns numerous patents and has been known in the past to be quick to sue. (This fact has recently been getting a good amount of attention, in light of some less-than-kind words traded between the company and Palm–the manufacturers of the upcoming Pre smartphone.)

Also, and perhaps even more important, Apple and Google have long shared a friendly relationship based both on a mutual respect for each other and a shared dislike for Microsoft. Even as Google has gotten into the smartphone business in its own roundabout way, the company has continued to develop software for Apple’s iPhone.

Of course, we do know that Android has mult-touch capabilities, which would come in handy–particularly with apps like Google Maps. So the question is, how much longer can friendship win out?

Just when it seemed that the Woz’s life was going to take a turn for the serious, ABC goes and announces the lineup for the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. Last week we reported that Steve Wozniak was getting ready to be a technical adviser to enterprise storage company, Fusion-io. Now, it seems, the Apple co-founder will also be moonlighting as a reality show star when Dancing With the Stars premiers on March 9th.

ABC officially announced the lineup for the new season of the show, including a quick, decidedly non-dancing centric bio of the Woz,

A Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist for the past three decades, Steve Wozniak, a.k.a. “The Woz,” helped shape the computer industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products, the Apple I and II, and influenced the popular Macintosh. After leaving Apple Computer Inc. in 1985, Wozniak was involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities in schools and stressing hands-on learning and encouraging creativity for students. In 2000, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment. Wozniak is also a published author with the release of his New York Times Best Selling autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon, in September 2006.

Of course you probably recognize him as the bearded dude on a Segway who dated Kathy Griffith.

I’m a music junkie, I admit it. But honestly, I thought that I would have appeased all of my pocket music library needs when I upgraded my iPod from 20GB to 80GB. It helped for a while, but every so often I find myself deleting yet another 30-minute experimental jazz track from my hard drive to make way for more new music. I have a problem.

iPod repair site, RapidRepair.com has a solution–a temporary one at least. The site today announced the addition of a 240GB iPod hard drive to its list of music player upgrades. No word on price yet, though the site’s 120GB hard drive is priced at $189.99, and I’m guessing you can add at least $20 to that price.

According to the site, the hard drive will be available for all 5G iPods. iPod Classic and Zune 2G are expected to be available at some point as well. In the meantime the site has a waiting list for the 5G models.

Poor, poor Macworld. When Apple announced back in December that 2009 would mark the company’s last keynote at the convention, many industry analyst began predicting the imminent death of the expo, a sentiment surely echoed by the subsequent announcement of an iLounge Pavilion at next year’s CES.

The speed at which the CEA has managed to fill the area–devoted to manufacturers of iPod and iPhone accessory manufacturers–has surely signaled that, at the very least, Macworld Expo 2010 will be a stripped-down, stark contrast to its predecessors.

The CEA announced today that it had already sold the section out. The organization has quadrupled the area’s size, in order to compensate for the demand. “”We have received an incredible response from companies interested in exhibiting in the iLounge Pavilion at the 2010 International CES,” CEA senior vice president, Karen Chupka, said in a statement issued today. “In fact, the original space allocated for the pavilion sold out in less than one week–a CES show record–and we’ve quadrupled the space to accommodate the overwhelming demand. This exciting new CES Pavilion brings momentum to the consumer technology industry and reinforces the International CES as the global hub for the latest innovative technologies.”

4,000 square feet was initially designated for the space. The CEA has since expanded the area to 18,000. The organization has also announced a handful of vendors that will exhibiting in the area, including Griffin Technology, Mobis Technology, Pro Clip USA, Scosche, and Incase Designs.

Can the demise of Macworld, which is traditionally held the same week as CES, be far behind?

It took a couple of days for this to surface, but it looks like Apple was awarded yet another patent last week–a big one. Awarded on January 20, the company scored patent number 7,479,949, which was applied for on April 18 of last year. The patent covers multi-touch functionality like pinch, rotation, and swipe.

World of Apple has the text from the patent titled “Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.”

It begins,

A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

Does this spell disaster for the forthcoming Palm Pre–the device to which most assumed Apple’s temporary CEO, Tim Cook, was referring to when he recently made veiled legal threats?

As our mobile analyst Sascha Segan would (and will no doubt continue to) say, “There. Is. More. Than. One. Multi. Touch. Patent.”