Everyone allied with Apple Allied )or Axis, depending on what side of the Apple iOS-Android fence you sit( power is gloating about how Google Android tablets don't compete with the hallowed iPad, which is unofficially recognized as the Holy Grail of tabletry. Usually, this comes in the form of reports citing financial analysts marking down their tablet expectations because Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" sucks so bad people are returning the Motorola Xoom in droves.

Google's Inside Search event wrapped less than a week ago, but folks are already finding new stuff the search engine is testing. That includes a new user interface for search results pages in Google.com, as well as a new trademark for Photovine, which may ultimately included facial recognition software down the road. Ho-hum, just the latest nod to Facebook, right? Let's discuss the search UI first. My peers at Google Operating System and The Next Web have noted the new UI,

Google could rue the day it built the Android operating system with Java code and spun it out to the world under an open source license. Oracle, which sued the search engine for patent and copyright infringement last August, is seeking damages "in the billions of dollars," Reuters said. This stunning revelation, which came one week after we learned that Oracle wants 50 percent of Google's mobile ad sales,

Many of us who follow Google closely have noted how the search engine is pushing its Google Places service to the forefront, using Google Maps as the location-based backdrop for the local business search effort. And why not? Places , which lets businesses list tons of information about themselves online as a massively indexed Yellow Pages, will be a real moneymaker for Google at a time when desktop search ads are giving way to more mobile search sales. To wit,

Peel off the layers of Platonian pomp - "the thirst for knowledge doesn't stop when you step away from your computer" and "we're breaking down the barriers between you and the knowledge you see" and Google is becoming the Lamborghini of search. Those quotes are how Google Fellow Amit Singhal described his search journey June 14 at the company's Inside Search event in San Francisco,

One of the hot topics for analysis in the wake of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last week was how iCloud compares to Google's cloud computing approach. As folks noted, Apple's cloud is a big backup and sync hub for the software that enables music and applications that live on Apple's dedicated devices, from Macs to iPhones, iPads and iPods to be. Some even noted that Apple's iCloid is what Microsoft intended for Live Mesh.

In the latest of several thoughtful blog posts from ex-Googlers about why they left, Dhanji R. Prasanna called out Google's infrastructure as, well, dated. Prasanna may understandably hold a grudge as one of the many Australian-based team members who worked on the doomed Google Wave collaboration software platform. Yet he said Google is easily the best job he ever had. His major criticism is that the software running in Google's dozens of data centers is 10 years old,

There's sort of a universally accepted meme that Google's Android platform had become to the mobile ecosystem what Microsoft Windows was to the desktop, albeit without the gross, per-copy licensing and maintenance fees Microsoft bankrolls with Windows. Strip away Android's open source mein, which some would deem pretense because of the proprietary code the search engine allegedly lifted from Java,

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop made some interesting comments during his speech at Open Mobile Summit in London today. No, it wasn't that Nokia isn't for sale . We sorta knew that. Rather, it's his affirmation that if it weren't for Apple, Android would not have risen to become so successful as MocaNews reported : Apple created Android, or at least it created the conditions necessary to create Android. People decided they could not play in the Apple way,

Are Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha's frustrations with the Android platform his company relies on to survive peeking through? That's the question I ask after Jha apparently said the lack of an approval process of Google's Android Market lends smartphones to performance issues because some apps chomp great amounts of power. He also indicated app multitasking also hinders handsets.

The idea of a smartphone based on Google's Chrome Operating System is getting some attention, but analysts don't necessarily agree on the possibility. Anton Wahlman, a former sell-side equity research analyst covering the communications space, wrote on TheStreet.com that Google will launch its own Google Phone and that it will be based on Chrome OS, not Android. He sees Google taking the Chrome OS cloud paradigm, which means Web applications only, to the phone form factor.

Once again, a brave soul has suggested that Facebook could kill Google thanks to its vast treasure trove of user data and its increasing ability to help users find a lot of information they would normally find on Google. Or at least ensure the info finds them. The latest in this parade of provocateur is Ben Elowitz, who founded Blue Nile and then then white label publishing platform Wetpaint. Elowitz, who I know to be a sharp guy from chatting with him about social media,

Google officials said at Google I/O that Chrome Operating System notebooks from Samsung and Acer would be available June 15 online from Amazon.com and Best Buy. That's still the case, but Google said it came in possession of a limited number of Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks , which I got to play with at a Samsung party in San Fran last month. The Series 5 notebook boots in 8 seconds and boasts a file system that supports documents and a media player for video and music,

Google Co-founder Larry Page was effusive in his praise about Eric Schmidt when he announced the CEO who had led Google for a decade would become executive chairman at the search engine. Page even went so far as to suggest Schmidt's appointment was a promotion. With Page taking over as CEO and day-to-day operations of Google, and Schmidt spun out to handle external diplomacy among companies and governments worldwide,

Anyone expecting a smartphone based on Google's Chrome Operating System will have to wait because it doesn't seem like the search engine is going that route anytime in the near future. Chrome Vice President Sundar Pichai, pictured with a Chrome OS-based Cr-48 test model last December, told Reuters at Computex that he planned to keep pushing Chrome OS for notebooks and has no immediate plan to port it to tablets or to merge it with Android.

I want Google Wallet to succeed, I really do. Wallet is the search engine's bid to marry a mobile payment application with NFC-enabled Android phones )actually phone , at this point(, and partner with financial services firms to let consumers pay for goods by tapping their phone. When the service goes live in New York and San Francisco this summer,

If someone were to tell you that Google just launched flight travel search results without using data it culled from ITA Software, you'd probably think it a joke. You'd be wrong. Less than two months after Google closed a very contentious negotiation to acquire flight data provider ITA for $700 million, the company has begun showing summaries of flight information right on its search results page.

Google will soon roll out a " people widget " in the right-hand side of their Gmail messages that surfaces content from friends and other contacts. Specifically, next to every e-mail message users will be able to see recent e-mails from users in a conversation, as well as Google Buzz posts, shared documents and calendar events. Check out to the right of this post. More importantly,

How do you feel about a smartphone based on Google's Chrome Operating System, the Web-based OS currently making its way to Amazon.com and Best Buy online via Samsung and Acer notebooks June 15. I can imagine the marketing campaigns for this. Chrome Home with Chrome Phone! On the Street.com, Anton Wahlman, a former sell-side equity research analyst covering the communications space, opined that Google will launch its own Google Phone and that it will be based on Chrome OS,