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The danger with carrying a smartphone in your pocket is that it is essentially a piece of glass held together with metal and plastic with sophisticated electrical innards. Warranties from original equipment manufacturers tend to not cover a phone if it is broken or has water damage. What if you drop your brand new iPhone 4S into a puddle? The glass is going to break and it is going to get water inside. When that happens, you are in trouble like a half-plucked turkey the day before Thanksgiving.

The folks at SquareTrade like to break things. SquareTrade is a third-party device warranty company that basically offers insurance for what Apple or the other OEMs will not cover in warranties. The company posted a video positing a Samsung Galaxy S II against an iPhone 4S. The results are not for the fanboy faint of heart.

Google announced today the closure of a number of services it's offered for years, including the much-maligned social network Buzz. Buzz wasn't just forgotten, though. It wasn't just a pre-cursor to Google Plus. It wasn't just rolled out awkwardly in February, 2010.

It was, according to the US Federal Trade Commission, an egregious enough violation of consumer privacy that all of Google will now be subject to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Many people still don't believe that Buzz violated anyone's privacy at all. I think it's important, as Buzz fades into the sunset of history, that such opinions be reconsidered and Buzz's wrongdoing be taken seriously. Lest it be repeated and so that social software can be built effectively in the future.

The day after its Q3 earnings report, Google announced a "fall sweep" of old products into the dustbin of Internet history. In the most telling move - albeit one which we knew would come - Google Buzz and its API are finished, and Google Plus will absorb the old content. The open data standards that made Buzz interesting will be replaced with the haltingly slow rollout of APIs for Google Plus. Google Labs is also gone for good. The site will shut down effective today.

In addition to Buzz and Labs, a slew of mis-remembered little projects are going away, too. Google Code Search and the Code Search API will be shut down on January 15, 2012. Jaiku, a 2007 acquisition of a Twitter-like nature, is no more. The social features for the iGoogle homepage will be replaced by Google Plus. The University Research Program for Google Search will close its API for academics.

It was an interesting quarter for Google. The search giant moved into uncharted territory with the launch of Google Plus, bringing its data-driven business squarely into the social realm. The branding of "Google+" is hard to ignore; how do you read that? It's "Google," but it's more. But to make the social network a + instead of a -, Google has to tie it into its core business - advertising targeted to searches - and use the social data to improve it.

Google can't do that without its mobile vehicle, Android, the most popular smartphone OS in the world. Mobile computing is becoming the most important kind. Its use surpassed desktop computing this year, and mobile ad revenue is exploding. Location-powered search is the key to the business, and Apple - Google's mobile competitor - is revving its engines in that space. Google Plus, the big Q3 experiment, is tailor-made for Android use. So where is Google's mobile vision in its Q3 earnings results announced yesterday? Good question. It isn't there.

In May, Google launched a long-awaited music service that landed with somewhat of a thud. Compared to some of the rumors that were flying around, Google Music turned out to be a rather basic offering. It was nothing more than a "cloud locker" for one's own music files. Not a streaming service. Not an MP3 store. Instead, the service was more analgous to Amazon's Cloud Drive, except without an accompanying music store.

That's about to change, according to a report from the New York Times. Google is currently in negotiations with music labels to launch an MP3 store as part of Google Music. The move would put Google in more direct competition with Amazon and Apple, the latter of which is the market leader in digital music sales.

Google Translate on Android now offers real-time automated audio translation for 14 languages, according to a Google blog post earlier today. The new languages include Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The new version is in alpha, so expect some bugs. The first version of Google Translate for Android with Conversation Mode launched back in January 2011, and offered only English to Spanish translations.

Google just launched a more streamlined process for updating small business listings on Google Places, but it asks forgiveness instead of permission. Instead of requiring owners to manually update the listing, Google Places will now automatically update with user-submitted info or updates to another source on the Web that Google identifies. When a listing is updated, the system will notify the business owner of the change by email.

Google touts this as a convenience and points out that a business owner can quickly log in from the email and correct any erroneous changes. But this is sort of a strange update. Google Places listings are an important way for businesses to be discovered from Web search, and business owners might not be partial to those listings updating without their expressed consent. Then again, some might feel that maintaining Google listings is a hassle, and this update will save them the effort.

Google Maps and Google Earth are converging on that virtual-reality future we've dreamed about. Today, Google announced Google MapsGL, an enhancement to Maps that uses WebGL to generate swooping 3D graphics inside your browser; no installations necessary. If your hardware meets the requirements, and if you use a WebGL-capable browser, you can opt into the 21st-century Google Maps experience.

Turns out that's a big "if," though. The requirements are pretty stiff. "Some low-end integrated GPUs" aren't supported, and apparently that of the latest MacBook Air is too "low-end." Even a 2-year-old MacBook Pro gets a warning message that MapsGL will "run slowly." You also have use Chrome (of course) or the latest Firefox 8+ Beta; Safari or ... the other ones ... won't cut it. MapsGL sure looks cool, though!

Google is rolling out the ability to link YouTube accounts with Google Plus. The link will add videos shared with you on Google Plus to your YouTube homepage. In a public Plus post, Nirav Mehta says that the process takes some time to complete initially.

To link your accounts, go to the Sharing tab in your YouTube account settings. YouTube and Google Plus already have some integration; Plus users in video Hangouts can watch YouTube videos live together.

Last week Android Open Handset Alliance member Myriad unveiled Alien Dalvik 2.0 that can port Android anywhere. Alien Dalvik runs is a virtualization tool for Android that runs in the cloud, meaning that Myriad can bring Android anywhere and everywhere.

When we wrote about Alien Dalvik 2.0 last week we promised to track them down and get a hands on video this week at CTIA Enterprise and Apps in San Diego. We are a couple days behind, but finally got a presentation of Android running on an iPad. Check it out below.