Google Earth for Android launched in early March, but the specific needs of adapting it for Verizon's phone and service took an extra month.

According to Birch, Google Earth for Android is compatible with most Android devices running 2.1. More Android phones will accommodate Google Earth as they adopt Android 2.1 or higher.

The Videos app will play rented movies on smart phones running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or 2.3 (Gingerbread). It should work on more than 80% of Android handsets, according to Google's statistics.

Movie rentals through the Android Market start at $1.99. Once a movie has started player, the user has 24 hours to watch it before the rental expires. Rentals can be saved locally to the phone for offline viewing. The app also enables you to watch other videos, such as ones you've recorded yourself with the phone's built-in camera.

This update to the app also includes the usual bug fixes and minor improvements.

While iPhone is shown to have grown from 3% to 4%, Android has jumped from 5% to 12%. In the fourth quarter of 2009, Myxer delivered seven times as much content to Android phones than iPhones.

When the report looks a little deeper into its numbers, it not only finds that the number of Android phones visiting the site have grown, but the number of phones running Android have too. During the fourth quarter alone, the number of Android devices doubled.

We think we can see this as more solid evidence that Android is going to offer some solid competition in the field of mobile OS.

As someone who's recently made the switch from iPhone to Android, I can attest that finding apps in the Android Market is not easy. "Currently, discovering apps from the over 100,000 apps available in the Android Market is limited to keyword-based search features," says StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp. "With StumbleUpon App Discovery, users can now find applications that are personally recommended to them and in many cases would previously have gone unnoticed."

On his blog, Freitas writes, "We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users.... secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality."

However, the developers who are currently preparing anonymous mobile browsing for its premiere are seeking volunteers for the app and for preparing the privacy-focused Android browser, Shadow. Interested parties should contact Freitas.

The question becomes: does mobile Flash really matter? For Android in general, the answer is yes, Flash does matter. For Android 4.0? Maybe. It all depends on how many Android Gingerbread users get the ICS push within the next couple of months and how much they rely on Flash. Most Gingerbread devices will eventually see ICS updates. Yet, with HTML5 being pushed by developers, this is a fork that Android users will hardly notice.

On the other hand, there is a lot of functionality that will be missed without some aspects of Flash for mobile on Android devices. Those using Android 2.3.4-7 have Flash pre-installed without likely realizing that it is there. That was also the first full build of mobile Flash that worked in the way that it was supposed to (even though technically it was available in Froyo 2.2). As of early November, 43.9% of Android users have Gingerbread. That means that they will eventually have ICS. Yet, if Flash is coming out by the end of the year then nearly 95% of those users will probably not miss it since it will take longer than that for the OEMs and carriers to push ICS to those devices (many of which just got Gingerbread in the first place).

For almost all users, the timetable for mobile Flash for Android 4.0 is a non-factor. Even for the next generations of Android (Jelly Bean?), the lack of it will not be a problem as mobile Flash is destined to soon become irrelevant with HTML5. Flash for older Android devices is not going anywhere and, according to Pocket-lint, mobile Flash continue to be support with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Do you really need mobile Flash on your Android Ice Cream Sandwich device? If you do, why? Let us know in the comments.

So in the spirit of giving good information (and not at all to combat ideas that Android is full of porn, I'm sure), Google will be adding content ratings to Android apps..

In preparation for the new ratings, starting next week, developers submitting new or updated applications will be required to provide a rating when they upload their apps to the Market. And by the time that all the ratings are visible to the public, all applications and games will have to be rated, otherwise they'll be automatically tagged as "Mature."

And that's great news for Android users, as Zuckerberg admitted that the Android app has always "been a little behind." Until today, Android users didn't have access to Places or Groups via the Facebook app (although the latter was unavailable on the iPhone app as well).

Today's updated version of the Android app adds Places and Groups, as well as improves the Notifications from within the app. The Android app still lacks the Chat feature, something iPhone users can still gloat about. But today's release brings the Android app closer to parity with the iPhone.

Well, right up until you compare it with the improvements rolled out today to the iPhone app's interface.

The iPhone now gets the Groups feature too. But in addition, there's a new look to the News Feed, which now makes it easier to add photos and check-ins, not merely status updates. Within the new Groups feature, similarly, buttons urge users to add photos and/or posts.

Both Android and iPhone apps are available for download now in their respective stores.

Add to that list now, AT&T Direct Carrier Billing for those Android folks (obviously) on the AT&T network. This means apps you purchase can be billed to your phone bill, instead of your having to pull out a credit card.

Chu says that the Direct Carrier Billing has been rolled out to all AT&T users over the past few days, along with other updates to the Market service. These include the new 15-minute refund window, an increase in the maximum .apk size, as well as content ratings and new categories for apps. The latter will include "Media & Video", "Music & Audio", "Business", and "Sports" games.

According to Chu, Android plans to "partner with more carriers" to bring this billing option to their subscribers. As it stands, AT&T and T-Mobile are the only US carriers that offer this.

The first phones using Google's Android platform were meant to go to market by the second half of this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, Google is facing some major setbacks thanks to the intricacies of the cell phone business.

In the international market, Google is also facing a number of problems. China Mobile apparently has problems translating the Android software into Chinese characters.

Unlike Apple, which put a lot of pressure on AT&T to retain control of both the hardware and software, Google is pursuing a different strategy by just providing the software platform and leaving everything else to the hardware manufacturers and network providers.

This news is definitely coming at a bad time for Google. Apple is set to release the next version of its iPhone on July 11th and a lot of buyers who were in the market for a modern smartphone and considered waiting for an Android phone might now move to an Apple or Blackberry device instead.

Blogger, the Google-owned blogging platform, announced today that it finally has an Android app. The funny part, of course, is that Android is Google's smartphone platform and Blogger has had an iPhone app since September 2009.

That said, Google loyalists rejoice! You can now update your Google-powered blog on your Google-powered Android phone!

"We are excited to announce our first version of the Blogger Android App," writes Vinay Sekhri, technical lead at Google. "Using the app you can easily compose a post, attach a photo that you just took with your phone, and either save it as a local draft for later or immediately publish it to your blog."

The app can handle multiple accounts, if you're one of those with multiple online identities, gives you the ability to preview your posts while on the go.

Everything beyond that looks pretty standard - quickly post text and pictures to your Blogger blog using your phone, view your content, share your stored photos and even share you location.

The best part, however, might be the platform integration. By installing the Blogger app on your Android device, it becomes one of the default sharing options, alongside Picasa, Gmail, and others. Whenever you come across a photo in your gallery or on a website, you can share directly to blogger from the sharing menu.

The Blogger app is available in the Android Market. On another note, isn't it nice that we can just give you a link to that Android app and not make you scan a QR code and check out the details on your phone? And, if you click on that link in your Android phone, it will take you to the Android Market app, not the website.

(To read more about Google's updated Web-based Android Market, check out yesterday's live blog of it's unveiling.)

With WordPress for Android, you can also configure and manage multiple blogs, which is a great feature for those of us who post on more than one site.

Using the app is pretty straightforward. Simply enter your blog's URL and your credentials and you are ready to go. The actual editor is a pretty basic HTML editor, though unlike WordPress' early iPhone efforts, it's easy to add links and italicize or bold text. The app also makes it very easy to select and upload photos from the phone's photo gallery to a WordPress blog. While we were testing the app, however, selecting an image on the Nexus One regularly led to a crash.

Open Source App

Just like WordPress for iPhone and WordPress for BlackBerry, the Android app is an open source effort. Indeed, a large part of the code base for Wordpress for Android is based on the popular wpToGo application, which will now be discontinued in favor of the official WordPress app. Developers who are interested in helping out can find more information here.

Android Open Accessory will allow an external USB hardware accessory to interact with an Android-powered device. This means that when an Android phone or tablet is in accessory mode, that connected accessory can be controlled. There have been some other external USB devices that can connect to Android, but until now their capabilities have been limited.

The ADK leverages the open-source electronics platform Arduino, and the ADK package download contains both hardware design files and the code that implements the accessory's firmware.

At the press conference following this morning's keynote, the Android team said that by opening up the ADK, they envision others will build the "killer applications" that utilize the new hardware and software capabilities. This is a huge opportunity for developers, they argued, to extend the Android platform into the home.

But to do that, particularly with some of the technologies hinted at on stage at Google IO today - namely Android@Home - Google says that it need to keep costs low for developers (and power and wireless costs low for the devices themselves). While details were still unclear about the Android@Home efforts, Google does say that this technology is set for release by the end of the year.

The Open Accessory Development Kit, however, is ready now and by utilizing the Arduino design, there are probably many tinkerers that are already set to build a number of apps and devices that can now be controlled by Android phones and tablets.

Based on the performance of iPhone apps, it's highly likely that we'll see more applications aiming for the lower end of that pricing spectrum than the upper end. But it will be interesting to see if any developers choose to charge a premium price - which isn't nearly as ridiculous as the App Store's $999.99 threshold - for their development efforts. Thankfully, according to the Market, "Once you've set a price for an application, you may choose to change it at any time."

The option of listing priced applications is currently only available to developers in the US and the UK. However, developers from Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain are slated to be allowed access to sell applications before April 2009. The Android Market hints at additional countries being added before the end of Q1, as well.

In related news, Australia developers just gained the opportunity to upload free applications. Singapore developers will soon have similar options.

For more information on uploading priced apps or purchasing them, visit Android Market support.

But climb it did. By September 2009, the Android Market passed 10,000 applications. By February of this year, Android Market share doubled again, positioning the Google Mobile OS to overtake Palm and the Market size grew again to include 19,897 applications. Today, the number of Android applications has reached 27,243 and there's no sign of its growth slowing down.

Although Apple still has far more mobile applications available for download, relative to the number of apps housed, Android is actually one of the fastest-growing mobile application stores on the market today. According to mobile analytics company Distimo, Android hasn't quite reached 30,000 yet, but in a statement last month from a Google representative, the company claimed there were "approximately 30,000 free and paid apps." Maybe they were just rounding up?