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In a legal filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco this morning, a copy of which was obtained from Oracle by RWW, attorneys for Oracle Corp. tell the judge in the ongoing infringement lawsuit against Google that it's willing to reopen negotiations for a settlement. Minutes ago, Google responded to that notice by telling the court it's willing to make executives available for settlement talks.

These events after documents filed yesterday in the case, and first uncovered by journalist Florian Mueller, reveal internal Google strategy briefings where it was suggested that Android should be developed on a course that appears to be open source, but actually is not. Instead, the documents from mid-2009 suggest, preferential treatment should be given specifically to Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless for being the first to develop Android phones to Google specifications.

In an effort to capture growing mobile traffic, The Guardian has launched a versatile native Android app. The app is free and ad-supported for all users, but it offers some powerful and distinguishing features.

It displays full-screen photo galleries and audio and video content in addition to text articles. It enables browsing by section, topic, or author, and users can save favorites for easy browsing from the app or the phone's home screen. It even allows downloading of the personalized homepage and favorites for offline reading. The feature set reflects a solid understanding of the needs of new media consumers on the part of The Guardian's mobile team, which we've been watching for a long time.

Building an Android version of its popular, filter-based photo sharing app is a "a major priority" for the team at Instagram, CEO Kevin Systrom told the Guardian recently. Indeed, this is one of the most frequently demanded features for the app, which notoriously only works on iOS.

It may be hard to believe, but Instagram hasn't even been around for a year. It launched for iPhone last October and has since enjoyed enormous popularity, ballooning to 1 million users in just 10 weeks. As of June 2011, Instagram had 5 million users and that number keeps on growing. In early August, the startup announced that its app had published over 150 million photos.

The adoption rate of smartphones in the U.S. continues to climb as 40% of mobile phone owners say they own a smartphone, according to new data from Nielsen.

In terms of operating system share, Android is still in the lead. Of those smartphone users, 40% are using Android and 28% are using iOS. These U.S. numbers don't come as a huge surprise, as last month Gartner reported that Android now commands 43.4% of the smartphone market worldwide. We first saw signs of Android taking the top spot in the beginning of this year.

In a blog post published today, Mozilla user experience designer Ian Barlow previewed the user interface their Mobile Team is in the process of building for a tablet version of Firefox.

Firefox for tablets, which does not yet have a release date, will be optimized to run on Honeycomb Android tablets. The browser will include features from the desktop version of Firefox such as tabs, themes and the Awesomebar, an adaptation of a feature launched with Firefox 3 that enables quick access to bookmarks and browsing history. Items synced from the desktop can also be accessed there.

We all know what the acronym BYOB means, but when it comes to bringing your own mobile devices, there are several implications for enterprise IT managers. Of course, BYOD isn't a new concept: people have been bringing their own PCs and connecting them to corporate networks almost as soon as the PC was invented back in the 1980s. I recall dealing with this issue as a young IT worker, trying to convince my manager that the nascent Compaq (which is now buried inside HP's product lines) wouldn't bring our network to its knees. Fun times.

Mozilla is continuing in its efforts to disrupt proprietary, single-vendor application ecosystems on mobile devices. This time around the Moz is taking up the task of providing a consistent API so developers can write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices and operating systems. Called WebAPI, the target is to provide "a basic HTML5 phone experience" within six months and submit the API to the W3C for standardization.

A new add-on for the Android SDK will enable developers to optimize their apps for Google TV or build new ones all together, the company announced on Monday.

The add-on lets developers emulate Google TV devices and build apps optimized for larger screens. It also includes new APIs for TV-specific features and actions.

A study from earlier this summer by wireless vendor Meraki reveals some starting information based on the data collected across their customers' networks. Apple's iPad users are piggy when it comes to their data consumption, averaging close to 200 MB monthly, compared to an average smartphone user of about 40 MB. They now account for four percent of all devices they have observed on enterprise networks.

Regardless of the size of the regulatory hurdle that the Google takeover bid for Motorola Mobility may be for the United States, the hurdle for Europe will be a formidable one. This despite the fact that both are American companies; they do business on a global scale, with global telecommunications partnerships. While the standard that any merger or acquisition must meet for U.S. regulatory approval typically boils down to, "It's good for business," the standard for Europe is, "It increases competitiveness."

That's hard to prove, especially given the fact that mergers typically result in one less company. But for the E.U., prospective merger partners must conclusively demonstrate that the state of the market following their combination would be more competitive than the state of that market if they had merely partnered. If Google was interested in aiding its case, it could decide to postpone many of the Android platform's planned improvements until after the merger. That could be at least 18 months, perhaps longer. We ran this theory past the mobile industry's leading expert, NPD Group Executive Director of Industry Analysis Ross Rubin, to get his reaction and to see whether he agreed that such a lull, were it to occur, could send the wrong signal to Android developers. (Part 1 of our discussion appeared in RWW last Friday.)