Jean-Louis Gassée raised an interesting point about whether or not Samsung, which if you believe the reports is on pace to sell 30 to 35 million phones from October to December, holds some sway over Google, the steward of the Android handsets Samsung has ascended to stardom with in the mobile realm. Google Executive Eric Schmidt said at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 10 that Samsung has become one Google's strongest Android partners. To wit,

Every year for CES )the Consumer Electronics Show, for the uninitiated(, I receive scores of pitches about glasses, wristwatches and other gadgets that aim to augment reality or at least pop it out in a lively way via 3D. When I stop by these booths, I'm regaled with tales from these gadget and gee gaw makers about how their products are the wave of the future. Indeed. Well, after awhile I laughed off a lot of these products because they don't make it to market, or if they do,

John Battelle offered this great chart above summarizing by strengths and weaknesses the areas where Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon compete, He calls these the Internet Big Five. "For me, these product lines, taken together, are the basis of what we might call "the operating system of our lives," Battelle wrote . Indeed. It's hard to argue with that. Using these companies, we search, socialize, shop game and do just about anything we want to do online.

The Google Nexus tablet rumor I wrote about here two weeks ago after Google Executive Chairman made some comments received new life from this brief DigiTimes report , which noted: Sources believe that Google will launch the own-brand tablet PC in March-April, featuring a 7-inch panel and Android 4.0 with a price less than US$199 to compete against Amazon. A 7-inch "pure Google experience" tablet would indeed compete with the already successful Kindle Fire.

On the heels of my post about Google and Facebook locked in a user engagement death match )or more appropriately, Google chasing Facebook here(, John Battelle sallied forth with the prediction that Facebook would launch a third-party ad platform. As in, the one Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his lieutenant COO Sheryl Sandberg, and numerous others have denied planning for the last few years. That would be what Battelle calls "FaceSense," Facebook's version of Google's AdSense .

Using his Business Insider blog operations as an example, Henry Blodget made a compelling argument as to why Google should pump more money into improving Google Apps. Blodget's predicament goes like this: Of course, because we are occasionally e-mailed Microsoft Office files and need to be able to open them, and because we occasionally need to do things that Microsoft Office apps do well and Google Apps don't, we still keep copies of Microsoft Office on most of our machines.

Facebook is killing Google, enjoying over 800 million users, half of whom log on to connect with family, friends and colleagues daily. This is the meme that's been boiling over from the tech press in the wake of Nielsen's latest top Web brands list. Certainly, when it comes to user engagement, or time spent online, Facebook wins in a walk, where users spend 4 times as much time as they do on Google : But this has been the case the last couple years,

I've been off for the past week, but this report from The Next Web caught my eye. It's nothing special - just the annual post about what Samsung is doing at Mobile World Congress in February. For this year, that includes the Galaxy S III smartphones. Recall last year that Samsung unveiled its popular Galaxy S II handset, which has gone on to sell over 10 million units worldwide since April. Those were dual-core handsets, ranging from 1.2GHz to 1.5GHz clock speeds.

Google continued its annual ritual of teaming up with Norad to track Santa. Google supplies its Google Maps and Street View software for Norad's Santa Site . Starting Saturday, Dec. 24 at 2:00 a.m. EST, Santa lovers can navigate to www.noradsanta.org in their Web browser to track Santa's global trip, starting from the North Pole: No, it's not a sequel to "The Polar Express," but you'd be forgiven for thinking so given the crisp animation.

Anyone out there like to use Firefox on devices other than their work or home PCs? Firefox for Android, which has 5 million to 10 million users, has been tuned to work better for Android "Honeycomb" and future tablet builds. For example, the Awesome Screen integrates Firefox Sync, keeping browsing history, open tabs, bookmarks and saved passwords across desktop and mobile devices. This type of sync feature, which also super popular on Google's Chrome Web browser,

Amazon has begun rolling out the promised update for its Kindle Fire tablet. The *over-the-air software package will help remove a lot of the latency we've come to see in the Fire since it launched Nov. 15 for $199. The New York Times columnist David Pogue outlined the improvements as such today : The home screen "carousel," a rotating shelf that holds all of your books, magazines and movies, now stops on a dime when you want it to.

Take any translation with a grain of salt, but if you believe Corriere della Sera's citation of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, the company will likely launch a Google Nexus-branded tablet based on the new Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" operating system 6 months from now. Possibly even in time for Google I/O in the last week in June.

Google has indexed and cataloged 76,000 images of the Metropolitan Musuem of Art's art collection for its Goggles visual search application. What's especially cool about this is that the Met let Google index thousands of photos or works it doesn't even currently feature on display. What this means is that when you visit the museum and want to learn more about a work of art than what's on its placard,

As I wrote last week , Google was preparing to let businesses offer check-in deals via the Google Places local search service. That's now come to fruition as a new feature in the Offer coupon creation option in the Google Places dashboard, as first pointed out by the eagle-eyed Mike Blumental . Google confirmed the new service for me and directed me to this Places support Web page , which explains the nitty gritty details.

Google's mobile software team has been busy building a better iOS application for Gmail. Six weeks after Google prematurely launched a native Gmail app for iOS devices, and 4 weeks after relaunching it with the necessary fixes, Google has added even more features to the program. Gmail for iOS users may now add a custom signature for their outgoing mobile messages, or even a vacation responder.

Seems everyone is finding it in their hearts to beat up on the Amazon Kindle Fire for its balky navigation and other gross fits and starts. On the other hand, most research firms still see the Fire, which Amazon dubbed its most successful product ever, as the tablet to beat this holiday quarter. Or at least, it's the Android tablet to beat after the iPad! While many analysts have been calling for the $199 Fire to sell 3 to 5 million units for the December quarter,

Google recently upgraded its movie search capabilities for Android smartphones and Apple iOS devices, making movie discovery along with their showtimes and theaters easier faster and easier to find. If only there were any decent movies out there to see as we speed toward Christmas... but that's another matter entirely. Anyway, instead of basic movie listings, when users search for films on Google.com from their smartphone browser,

With less than 3 weeks left in 2011, Android OEMs are racing to pump out the last of their smartphones and tablets for people like myself to review )and, they hope, for consumers to purchase for Christmas!(. The good news is I expect to get a Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1 any day now after receiving a heads-up from Motorola's PR late Friday. The bad news I have no idea when I'll get the Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" phone from to test Verizon Wireless.

The Google+ team has been hard at work, adding well over 100 features since launching the platform June 28 and releasing it to public beta in September. One area that hasn't been addressed much has been Google+ Photos, which were actually pretty solid at launch. What's better than the Instant Upload feature for Android phones? Google+ hopes users try Find My Face , a new feature that lets users tag photos. Over the next few days,

John Battelle is doing some nice culling for his next book, " What We Hath Wrought ." Normally, I'd shun any book with a title like that because it invokes the dreaded Triple P threat: portentous, pompous and pretentious. But this is Battelle, baby. Even if the title sounds like something an Ivy League essayist wrote, I'll eat it up. So will many others. To wit, Battelle is looking at the Internet Big 5 as the 5 companies shaping the Web for years to come. They are,