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Developers are going to notice one thing immediately when they download the Android 4.0 SDK: Ice Cream Sandwich is built from Honeycomb, not Gingerbread. The user interface is Honeycomb, and the widgets, calendar, contacts and multi-tasking are all improvements taken from Honeycomb. Google has issued several new application programming interfaces and improved the support packages and software developer kit controls. One of the purported goals of Ice Cream Sandwich was to make developing for Android easier and more accessible. Did Google accomplish that goal?

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.

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.

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.

Mobile browser Opera announced today new versions of its Android browser with new features that will help users control the amount of data they use while surfing the mobile Web. Opera Mobile 11.5 and Mini 6.5 uses cloud technology to reduce the size of Web pages by up to 90% and is another entry into the trend of using the cloud to offload data traffic, something the new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet will do with its "Silk" browser.

Opera will show you exactly how much data you have used and how much you have saved with a dedicated page in the browser. The goal is to help users save money on pay-as-you-go data plans. It can also be helpful to the millions of users who face data caps and throttling coming from the carriers. Check out the video of Opera's new Android browser below.

News360, a personalized news reader on the major mobile and tablet platforms, has added Google Plus integration using the newly released Google Plus API. News360 started off as a simple aggregator, but its 2.0 version launched in August added machine learning smarts to crawl users' feeds and learn what topics interest them.

News360 now personalizes the news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Evernote and Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user's interests. The developers found that the long, in-depth updates users post on Google Plus are rich in semantic data that can improve personalization. The personalization syncs between the tablet and the desktop Web version, but the mobile versions don't have it yet.

In our continuing tradition of rounding up new mobile application releases we found interesting and/or exciting over the past month, we present you with this new list of apps for September 2011. There are some great game, new browser releases and innovative uses of augmented reality this month. There is also a new section for prominent updates you may have missed during the month. Check it out below.

The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.

An innovation called Android@Home was unveiled at Google's I/O conference in May that intends to bring Android into your living room. Not much has been heard about Android@Home since but that does not mean that the little green robots have been shirking their duties in an attempt to take over the world. Yesterday, Myriad Group, a global mobile technology company, unveiled Alien Dalvik 2.0, a software kit intended to spring Android from smartphones and tablets to any device that has a screen.

Next week at CTIA, one of the largest mobile conferences in the country, Myriad will show off how it ported Android applications to Apple's iPad. If Android can invade the iPad, it can go anywhere. Myriad intends to do just that, porting Android apps to Internet TVs, automobiles, e-readers and avionics.

The latest U.S. mobile market share numbers from comScore are out and Android is still rolling. On the flip side, the decline of Research In Motion's BlackBerry platform is starting to accelerate. Apple held steady and made a slight gain through the summer even though the only tangible evidence of a new iPhone was speculation emanating from the technosphere.

As of August, Android now controls 43.7% of the U.S. smartphone market share. Of the 84.5 million U.S. consumers with smartphones, that means Android is in the hands of about 36.9 million of them. Android is up 5.6% since May. Apple is up 0.7% from 26.6% to 27.3% in the same time frame. The growth of Android and Apple came at the expense of RIM, which lost 5% from 24.7% to 19.7% in the United States. The blanket numbers are interesting at face value, but there are undercurrents guiding the market that may not be readily apparent.

Google has just announced a redesign for Google Docs on Android. The new interface uses a three-column view displaying filters and collections on the left, the document list in the middle and document details on the right.

The Google Docs Android app launched in April, enabling mobile uses of the software such as optical character recognition (OCR) using the camera.