Sure, 5,000-plus attendees received limited edition Android 3.0 "Honeycomb"-based Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets like this one at Google I/O May 10. But it looks like those who purchase or otherwise procure the commercial version will get the 10.1 with Android 3.1, the freshest version of Honeycomb currently only available on the Motorola Xoom. Blogs such as Boy Genius Report picked up on a tip Samsung Mobile USA left via it Facebook page,

Google eBooks has been on the market 6 months, an amazing amount of time for the search engine to go without publiczing pretty much anything about the digital book service designed to tackle Amazon and Apple from behind in the e-reading market. Last week, Google added dictionary, translation and search capabilities, showing that the gorilla had awoken from its e-reading slumber to add some key tools to the nascent service. Now Google said it has seen 2.

If you keep pounding the table with a contrarian view, will your view become the norm instead of the exception? Or will your voice drown in the howling void of misplaced hopes? Those are the questions I find myself asking after reading the Microsoft Bing Director's comments about search and what is wrong with it in an interview he did with The Huffington Post . I've seen Weitz speak and I've spoken to him in person over the phone for an extended period of time.

Google isn't looking to become your mortgage broker or loan officer, but it is looking to hook you up with one - officially. The search engine May 19 opened Google Advisor, a one-stop shop for financial services regarding credit cards, CDs, checking, and savings accounts, including mortgage comparison tools. Available only in the U.S. for now, Google Advisor lets users search for financial services products and then lists competing choices side by side.

The Empire has struck back. More than a year and a half after Google lured the city of Los Angeles to its Google Apps, Microsoft has poached a municipal government customer in the search engine's own backyard. The city of San Francisco, Google's home away from its Mountain View, Calif., home, agreed to use Microsoft Exchange Online Web-based e-mail for its 23,000 employees.

There's so much being said about the Microsoft-Skype deal still that I thought I'd call attention to two good pieces. One I agree with, one I don't. Let's start in the affirmative. Kevin Fury, formerly designer at Google and currently at Mozilla Labs, has a great, 35,000-foot view of how Microsoft and Nokia, and Apple and Google before them, have been making moves to disrupt the reviled telecommunications hegemonies in the U.S.

It's not easy worshipping at the temple of cloud computing. Google and Amazon, which suffered recent outages know this full well. Now Microsoft, which has gloated over Google's cloud outages in the past, feels its rivals' pain. As my eWEEK colleague Nick Kolakowski wrote about the failure that led to Microsoft BPOS customers without e-mail last week: On May 10, malformed e-mail traffic sparked a growing message backlog that impacted some customers for up to six to nine hours.

It bothered me a bit when Google declined to comment on Facebook's treachery in what I'll hammily call Social Circle Gate last week. For those who missed it, Facebook fessed up to hiring Burson-Marstellar to plant stories about Google is infringing on user privacy with Social Circle, a feature that scrapes Google Account users' connectionsto help improve Google Social Search. The feature is the quickest path for Google to map out a social graph,

That Amazon.com is building a tablet is no longer a question of it, but when we will see the long-rumored device. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told Consumer Reports to "stay tuned" in answer to a question about whether was building a multi-purpose slate to complement its uni-purpose Kindle e-reader. "We will always be very mindful that we will want a dedicated reading device," he said. "In terms of any other product introductions, I shouldn't answer," Bezos told Consumer Reports .

Google I/O is really shaping up to be Christmas in May. Last year it was a free HTC Evo 4G. This year, it's a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 limited edition tablet and a free Verizon mobile hotspot and SIM card. See the Tab unboxed: What will it be next year? One of those Life Fitness bikes with a full complement of Android exercise apps? Maybe an Android-powered music hub? Seriously, the Tab, which at 1.24 pounds managed to be lighter than the 1.

What you're looking at above is a screenshot of a picture I took of an unnamed coalition initiated by Google to curb some of the massive fragmentation going on within the Android ecosystem. Hugo Barra, vice president of Android product management revealed the partners during a presentation here at Google I/O. The coalition, which a Google spokesperson told me sprang up quickly in the last couple of weeks, feels ad-hoc, but that's okay.

Google rolled out Chrome 12 to beta May 9, loading up the build with better graphics by adding support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, and bolstering its Safe Browsing technology. The 3D CSS lets developers add 3D effects to Web content. Meanwhile, the fresh Safe Browsing release will still proect users from malware and phishing Websites, but now it will warn users before they download some types of malicious files. Users may also now delete Flash Local Shared Objects )LSOs(,

Google won't release any social-oriented products at Google I/O this week, confirmed several top tech blogs, which is pretty much blows my theory from months ago out of the water. Google +1 was launched in March and I truly didn't expect to see it released before I/O. We were all wrong. Apparently we will see what the +1 button will look like for publishers, which is a big deal. Remember, it's Google's version of the Like button. More on that later.

Google has been mostly quiet in this first week of May leading up to the big bangs it will announce at Google I/O May 10 and May 11 )think Chrome OS netbook and Android stuff(. However, Google's Marissa Mayer, vice president of local product management, unveiled Google Business Photos at the Social-Loco conference in San Francisco May 5. Mayer also detailed Google's location strategy a bit for the crowd. Business Photos are pretty much what they sound like. Local businesses,

Google has spent some much time porting Web services functionality from its desktop to its mobile Android services, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the mobile team is giving something back: Google's Voice Search service has been spotted in the wild on Google.com. That's right; the little microphone icon you see in the Google search widget and virtual keyboard on Android smartphones and as a feature of Google Search app for iPhone, BlackBerry,

Many publications have called attention to the new Google Chrome Web browser advertisements Google began running on network television May 3. The 90-second ad spot, dubbed "The Web is What You Make of It," shows a father who sets up a Gmail account for his daughter. He begins e-mailing her pictures )from Google's Picasa Web Albums( of her life's stages from birth to roughly the age of 6 or 7, at which point he's uploading YouTube videos of her riding a bike and taking ballet.

Google cares about location. A lot. Duh. As congressional inquiries against smartphone software providers' use of location data to improve Web services mount, The Wall Street Journal and San Jose Mercury News both cited e-mail messages between Google Co-founder Larry Page and Google location product manager Steve Lee that underscored the importance of location data to the company.

GigaOm learned that Logitech sales of its Google TV-enabling Revue companion box and its associated peripherals hit only $5 million in the first quarter, down sharply from $22 million from Q4 and $13 million less than it expected. I guess the holiday sale honeymoon was short-lived. Maybe all of the negative reviews caught up to eclipse the product's marketing, which has also been scaled back. Haven't seen the Kevin Bacon commercial in a while now... since January at least.

Motorola Mobility announced first quarter earnings of $3 billion April 28, up 22 percent from the first quarter of 2010. The company said it shipped 4.1 million Android handsets and 250,000 Motorola Xoom Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" tablets. The Xoom numbers pale in comparison to the 4.7 million iPads Apple sold in its first quarter, but must seem great to those who bought Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdry's claim that consumers purchased only 25,000 to 120,000 Xoom units.

There's a lot to say about Siva Vaidhyanathan's "The Googlization of Everything: )And Why We Should Worry(," published last month by The University of California Press. Let me start with this: If the Justice Department and/or Federal Trade Commission are interested in launching broad antitrust lawsuits into Google's search practices, it would do well to read Googlization as a primer.