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Flickr just announced its first native Android app for shooting and sharing photos. It offers quick filters, topic and location tagging, access to comments and groups, and full-screen browsing and slideshows. It has a full list of sharing options as well as privacy controls.

There's also a new feature for all Flickr users called Photo Session, which lets members browse photo slideshows in sync together over the Web. Users can chat and doodle on photos during a Photo Session. It supports all major desktop browsers, iPhone and iPad.

It is interesting to look through all the material that Amazon has released for its announcement of the new Kindle Fire tablet. From the announcement of the new family of Kindles, to the product page on Amazon.com to the press release for the new cloud-based browser Silk, the word Android is not mentioned once.

The Kindle Fire is a tablet, built off Android. Amazon developers forked Android somewhere along the way, probably from either the Frozen Yogurt 2.2 or Gingerbread 2.3.4 so really, this is actually a tablet built off a smartphone OS and not the official Android tablet OS, Honeycomb. Yet, Amazon is about to blow the rest of the Android tablet ecosystem out of the water.

Amazon issued a press release moments ago that may put to rest rumors of a tablet thought to be forthcoming from the e-retailing giant.

The company is holding an invite-only event in New York on September 28 but they are not saying what the event is about.

Out of all these stories, Windows 8 may indirectly have the most impact over the next five years.

One of the beautiful things about the Android ecosystem is that third-party functionality is not just highlighted, but wholeheartedly endorsed. Nothing shows this better than the third-party browser ecosystem.

A good portion of the innovation done in with Android browsers is being driven by two factors. 1) The native Android browser is considered subpar and 2) HTML5 performance. The race to the top will be which of these browsers offers the most bug free experience folded into the evolution of new browser experiences.

Improved mobile phone cameras and the ability to live stream anything from a phone has proved threatening to police who don't like to be filmed, but an app used by the University of Maryland police department could be the future of 9-1-1.

The University of Maryland police department is testing an app that will allow police to monitor live video of an emergency situation and will allow a mobile user to beam video to the police station in a time of need.

As expected, the tablet is exploding. Worldwide, 62.5 million units are projected to have shipped in 2011, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). The organization increased its forecast from 53.5 million units after demand for the iPad 2 drove additional tablet sales in the second quarter of this year. Year over year, tablet shipments in the second quarter increased by 88.9%.

Apple, who is expected to remain dominant in this space for at least a few more years, leads the pack with 68.3% of the worldwide tablet market share. In the same quarter, Android's share of the tablet market actually decreased to 26.8% from 34% in the first quarter. Google's slowly-growing threat to the iPad was chiseled away at by both RIM's Blackberry Playbook and the popularity of Apple's iPad 2.

Nielsen has released its first mobile app rankings for Android since the organization started measuring smartphone usage directly using on-device meters.

The results are not hugely shocking, but contain some interesting tidbits nonetheless. The list is broken down into three rankings: overall usage, male usage and female usage. The top half of each list is littered with the apps you'd guess were popular: Facebook, Gmail, Maps, YouTube. Pandora, Words With Friends, Twitter and Amazon's Kindle app all make expected appearances in the top 20 as well.

Verizon is announcing today at its developers' conference that it is has completely rebuilt its application store that ships with every new Android device the carrier sells. Starting from scratch, Verizon has recreated its own Android application store and integrated a new search feature from app discovery engine Chomp.

The Verizon Android store will focus on premium apps and ship alongside the Android Market on Verizon devices. Verizon is dropping its V Cast app store and renaming it Verizon Apps. On the flip side, Verizon is trying to make app search easier through its partnership with Chomp, a company that has created an algorithm specifically designed to tackle the tricky problem of app store search results.

Google's Android operating system for smartphones has seen dramatic growth in Europe, where it now ranks as the second most popular smartphone OS on the continent, according to the latest numbers from ComScore.

Symbian still leads the pack, but Android blew past the iPhone to grab 22.3% of the market in Europe. Just last year, Android commanded only 6.1% of that market. Android's popularity has contributed to a huge growth in smartphone adoption in Europe, where the number of smartphone owners has grown by 44% since last year.