Hasta La Gadget!

We all knew that Android Gingerbread was coming–keeping with Google’s tradition of naming major updates to its mobile OS after alphabetical dessert foods (see: Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, and Froyo), but something’s not really officially official until it gets a statue, right? At least not on the Google campus.

Gingerbread got just that, late last week. You can watch a video of the ceremony, after the jump, if the idea of a team of grownup geeks erecting a giant Gingerbread Man statue seems like a good way to pass a minute and a half on a Monday morning.

Google has talked the upcoming OS a bit, but has yet to release a ton of details (including whether it will be Android 2.3 or 3.0). A few weeks back, Android head honcho Andry Rubin had this to say about the operating system,

More forms of communication. I think social media is a form of communication. I think you would just talk about general improvements to the platform and make it faster and more robust. I think gaming is an area that I think is underserved right now. We’re actually going through a reinvention of casual gaming. If you look at a console game like an XBOX or a PlayStation or a Nintendo, I think it’s very, “sit down and try to get to the maximum level possible.” On cell phones and devices that are battery operated, I think there’s more kind of “what do you do in between the times when you’re doing something?” It’s more about running a game to fill time rather than running a game to be a dedicated event.

Don’t worry, we’re as confused as you are about this whole Android thing. We keep getting little hints about the future of Google’s mobile operating systems–names like Honeycomb, Gingerbread, Ice Cream. If the alphabetical thing holds up, then it ought to go in exactly that order.

The question is what the number release on the next major upgrade will be. Many have suggested that Gingerbread will actually be version 3.0 of Android. New comments from an anonymous Google engineer on the Android forums, on the other hand, seem to that 2.3 is actually the next big release in the pipes.

The engineer replied to user concerns about enterprise Wi-Fi problems after updgrading to Froyo, writing, “Yes, Android 2.3 is a “marjor release,” and this patch will be available then.”

No word on whether 2.3 will be the mythical Gingerbread, however.

T-Mobile announced today that the new HTC HD7, one of the carrier’s new Windows Phone 7 devices, will be available for purchase in the US starting on November 8th for $199 US with a new two-year agreement and $50 mail-in rebate.

The HD7 features a huge 4.3-inch display, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 16GB of storage built-in, and a 5-megapixel camera that can shoot video in720p. The phone will also come bundled with Slacker Radio and Netflix apps for streaming music and video direct to the device. Before you sign up to be one of the first people to get your hands on one though, you might want to read Sascha Segan’s hands-on with the HTC HD7 at PCMag.com.

In terms of sheer unchecked enthusiasm, this shot has nothing on this memorable image of the first guy to buy an iPad in China. Still, there’s something to be said about the civility of the whole thing–like a nice lukewarm bowl of oatmeal.

This is the first person in the world to purchase a Windows Phone 7 handset. The shot is from a store in New Zealand. Everyone seems pretty content about the whole thing. There may or may not have been an orderly queue involved. It’s hard to say for sure.

Steve, Steve, Steve. You really stirred up the pot this time, didn’t you? You couldn’t just leave well enough alone? Peter Oppenheimer and Tim Cook were doing perfectly well, running down Apple’s triumphant numbers during the earnings call early this week, but you had to jump on the line and poke fun at the competition.

Google’s Andy Rubin was the first to respond to Jobs’s comments that the whole Android openness thing is overrated. TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth also came to Android’s defense, after his company ended up becoming fallout in Jobs’s assertions. Both men responded on Twitter, naturally.

We all knew it was just a matter of time before a Research in Motion executive hit back at Jobs over his comments. After all, the Apple chief kicked off his statement with a little friendly BlackBerry bashing,

[Apple’s sales figures] handily bea[t] RIM’s 12.1 million BlackBerrys sold, in their most recent quarter ending in August. We’ve now passed RIM. And I don’t see them catching up to us in the foreseeable future.

They must look beyond their area of strength and comfort, into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them, to create a competitive platform, and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform after iOS and Android. With 300,000 apps on Apple’s App Store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb.