Move over Steve Jobs

The Android mobile phone platform is taking off. Google says it's activating 200,000 Android phones each day. That's a lot of phones. Android's being called "the kind of smash hit that techies dream about". Latest reports say the Android is shifting the balance of power back to Silicon Valley and credit it with seriously upping the stakes in the fight between Android's owners Google and Apple.

And the first Android-based tablets are due out this year.

Writing in Newsweek, Daniel Lyons suggests we're now at the point where we can say the PC is being displaced by smartphones and tablets. Which is amazing when you consider how long it took to get from the mainframe to the PC.

Researchers are estimating there will be 5 billion mobile phones in service by next year. There's only 7 billion people in the world, so that suggests a pretty high penetration of mobiles on all continents, including Africa (maybe Negroponte should be aiming at "One Tablet per Child").

Within a decade, it's estimated that the technology will be so cheap that all those billions of phones will be smart phones - which really does make the notion of One Tablet per Child realistic.

Maybe Andy Rubin will take over from Steve Jobs as the coolest geek on the planet. Possibly his smartest move was using open-source software. He argues that using open-source means an "accelerated form of evolution", meaning every company that uses the software (eg Motorola, Samsung) contributes to its development, unlike a closed system like Apple.

Everybody's suing everybody else of course - Microsoft is suing Android, Apple is suing phonemaker HTC, Oracle's suing Google - which as Lyons says proves everybody is taking Android very seriously.

Leaving the final word to a Harvard researcher: "I can't imagine anything since the spinning jenny that will so profoundly change the lives of people..." Maybe he's right.

Ethical Issues around mobile privacy

From Lookout, a mobile privacy "watchblog" some alarming privacy statistics for mobile applications:

• 29% of free applications on Android have the capability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone

• Nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access user’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%)

• 47% of free Android apps include third party code, while that number is 23% on iPhone * third party code enables custom ads to be served and/or analytic behaviour tracking.

A user's location, call history and personal contact list is highly sensitive data, as opposed to web cookies stored in your browser. It's only bound to increase drastically over time. Here are a few "topics" to consider:

1. What implications does this have for mobile phone users? How about for advertisers and mobile providers?
2. Does this affect your opinion of favorite iPhone or Android apps -- in particular free ones? Should mobile app developers take it upon themselves to help reverse this trend?
3. How can we as users of this technology stop this violation of privacy? Through government, our purchasing decisions, or both?