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This morning at Qualcomm's Uplinq 2011 conference in San Diego, Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, announced the launch of HTCDev, a new developer program which opens up HTC's "Sense" user interface (UI) for Android to developers. The program's early partners include LinkedIn, Google Picasa, Gameloft and others, all of which have used the new tools to build plugins and add-ons to more deeply integrate their apps with HTC's iconic UI.

Qualcomm has announced the introduction of the "Snapdragon Game Pack," a collection of over 100 mobile games optimized for Snapdragon-based devices and its embedded Adreno GPUs. The goal of the new release is to highlight the advanced graphics capabilities of Qualcomm chipsets, and the mobile gaming experience they enable. It will also be made available to OEMs and operators for pre-installation on forthcoming mobile devices, the company reports.

RIM has released its BlackBerry Java SDK v7.0 into beta, which allows mobile developers to build applications for the new version of the BlackBerry operating system, BlackBerry 7 OS. Among other things, the SDK offers app developers device integration capabilities for access to the phone's features, including the magnetometer (compass), location data, maps and more.

It also adds support for NFC (near field communications), the short range wireless technology that enables the forthcoming digital wallets and mobile payments systems, in addition to serving as a barcode scanning replacement technology. The first NFC-enabled BlackBerry phones, the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930, are due out later this summer.

Last week, we cited a study from mobile analytics firm Distimo that stated the majority of paid Android applications were downloaded less than 100 times. On Android, folks like the free apps, it seems. Now, to back up that report with additional data, we have mobile search firm Chomp's report for the month of April.

During this past month, 97% of all Android downloads throughout its search properties were free apps, and that number has increased by 2% over March, the company says.

Catch is often thought of as an Evernote competitor, thanks to the company's simple, note-taking applications for iOS and Android. But more recently, the company's APIs were found integrated into a high-profile mobile application: Google's official app for its I/O developer conference. In the Google I/O app, Catch was used to help attendees create and manage conference notes using the Catch service.

As it turns out, there are today over 40 apps using Catch's APIs, including those from the BBC and TED, plus recipes and horoscopes apps and others. And now, with Catch's newly launched annotations API and its support for structured data, Catch can enable different mobile apps to talk to each other.

Ten days after patent holder Lodsys sent out threatening letters to iOS developers, claiming infringement and demanding licensing fees, Apple sent its lawyers to defend against the attack. According to Apple's legal team, the license it holds on Lodsys' in-app payments technology also extends to its developer community.

So what did Lodsys do next? It went after an Android developer, it appears.

A new report from mobile analytics firm Distimo takes an in-depth look into the download volumes in Google's Android Market, and the numbers it finds are somewhat surprising. Android may have a larger number of apps - 200,000 Google reported earlier this month - but it doesn't have a large number of "winners."

Distimo found that just 96 applications have been downloaded more than 5 million times in the Google Android Market, for example. In addition, 20% of free apps and 80% of paid apps have been downloaded less than 100 times to date.

This morning, Microsoft officially revealed the future of its Windows Phone mobile operating system, a release known as "Mango." Now, the first set of developer tools to work with the new platform are being made available online, in beta format.

For developers, these tools offer a major leap in the types of applications which can be built for the mobile OS, as they introduce much-requested features like multi-tasking, access to sensors and better ways to utilize Windows Phone's Live Tiles.

Apple is defending its iOS application makers from alleged patent infringements by Lodsys LLC saying that it has already licensed patents from the company, hence the applications makers have full right to use the technology.

Lodsys sent a letter to application makers on May 13 saying they must pay the company for use of such technology as in-app payments. Today, Apple sent a letter to Lodsys saying the company has a "fundamental misapprehension regarding Apple's license and the way Apple's products work." Lodsys likens Apple to a landowner that a hotel is built on and the services provided are the responsibility of the hotel, not the landowner. Is Lodsys trying to sell the same bill of goods twice or are application developers liable to pay Lodsys for the patents outside of the services that Apple provides to them?

Rhomobile, makers of an open source Ruby-based framework for building mobile applications for major smartphone operating systems, recently launched the latest version of their toolkit, Rhodes 3.0. The updated framework has added support for NFC (near field communications), the backbone for the upcoming mobile wallet systems and more. Rhodes is also the first framework outside of Microsoft's official channels to support Windows Phone 7.