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If there were any uncertainty that Google's acquisition of Motorola would be approved by regulatory agencies across the world, one only has to look at the fourth quarter of 2011 to see why it never was in danger. The last quarter of 2011 showed us which companies really control the smartphone market and Motorola was certainly not one of them. Between Apple and Samsung, the two behemoths controlled 95% of mobile phone profits worldwide, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley.

The pincer formation at the top of the ecosystem means that no regulatory agency can deny Google its $12.5 billion purchase. Life has also become extremely difficult for all the other OEMs and mobile platforms trying to make a dent in the market. If you are not making an iDevice or some type of Galaxy product, Apple and Samsung are squeezing you out of the market. The clock is ticking.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant

Ours is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires and our need to possess, while maintaining a façade of moral righteousness, puts us at odds with the reality that exists within the systems we have created.

In recent days, the character of our era of consumerism has been put in question. We want what is new, shiny, fashionable. We want it now. With this desire we turn our heads from the consequences it takes to produce our toys, our symbols of status. When The New York Times reports that our gadgets are made in Chinese factories where working conditions can be horrendous, we express outrage and tweet the article from our iPads. The culture we have created comes with the cost of doing business.

One of the most entertaining aspects of studying the Android ecosystem is the fact there is just so much of it. It is overwhelming, especially for consumers that do not know what smartphone or tablet they are supposed to buy because a new device is released every other day.

Samsung is the largest culprit of the flood of Android devices to inundate the flood plains of the mobile coastline. Just look at its Galaxy Tab line of tablets. None have performed well on the market. Unlike smartphones, the "be everything to everybody" approach does not work in the tablet market. There is a reason that Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle Fire are eating Samsung's tablet lunch.

The king of digital devices is ready to impose its will on the rest of the ecosystem in 2012. It is lining up billions of dollars in investments and is rumored to be in on every significant acquisition or partnership. Its empire sprawls across televisions, smartphones, laptops and computer processors. What is Apple doing now, you might ask. That would be the wrong question. The biggest influencer of the entire digital ecosystem does not hail from Cupertino. Look across the Pacific to South Korea. There, you will find Samsung.

The long evolution of Tizen continues and is about to get its biggest boost yet. Samsung is going to merge its Bada platform with the Tizen project, bringing the Linux-based operating system to more smartphones and developers across the world.

Tizen is the Linux smartphone operating system that was once called MeeGo that, in turn, was once the confluence of Maemo and Moblin from Nokia and Intel. Nothing tangible has ever really come out of the Tizen/MeeGo project except for a few demo phones and the Nokia N9 and N950. With Samsung throwing its manufacturing weight behind the Tizen development project, that may be about to change.

It's not even Day 1 at this year's CES in Las Vegas, but already we've seen a flurry of product announcements. One of the more impressive was from Samsung. Internet TV is expected to be a big trend of 2012 and as the world's number 1 TV brand, Samsung is a company to watch. Especially given the gains Samsung made over 2011 with the Galaxy series of smartphones and tablets, which made it the leading vendor of Android-based devices in the world.

The big news from Samsung today was a Smart TV push. The word "smart" here refers to Internet connectivity. Samsung's 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. It remains to be seen how well these new Internet features are implemented, because software and user experience have not historically been strengths of Samsung. But the message today was clear: Samsung is doubling down on its core TV leadership and attempting to make the TV the main household Internet device.

Rumor surfaced last week that Samsung, the largest manufacturer of Android devices, may be looking into buying webOS from Hewlett-Packard after the computer company announced it would no longer manufacturer mobile devices. Samsung CEO Choi Gee Sung told reporters that Samsung would "never" buy webOS. This week, new rumors suggest that Samsung is considering throwing development resources into near-defunct mobile operating system MeeGo, a week after Intel dropped support of the platform.

It would make sense for Samsung to consider its options, especially in the wake of the Motorola/Google deal and the potential effects on the Android ecosystem. Yet, these rumors are also a classic case of the anatomy of how rumors circle the world of technology on a daily basis.

Samsung has announced that it is bringing the latest smartphone iteration of Android to its Galaxy line of devices. Sometime within the next month or so users around the globe will be able to put Gingerbread on to their Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab devices along with Galaxy Ace/Gio/Fit and Mini devices.

Samsung's press release says that the upgrades will start in the United Kingdom and Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway presumably) in mid-May and spread from there. Samsung Galaxy S owners in the U.S. fought tooth and nail to get Samsung and the cellular carriers to rollout an upgrade from Éclair to Froyo so it is no sure thing that Gingerbread will be ready in a timely fashion state side.

Samsung has launched a new developer forum today, just for its Android application developer community. The forum, linked to from Samsung's existing developers website (http://developer.samsung.com), will include "additional features and functionality," according to the handset maker. Currently, the forum is offering news, updates, technical advice and support, plus many other development tools and SDK plugins.

HTML5 has been seen as a silver bullet for developers building rich, cross-platform sites for desktops, smartphones and tablets. Tablet in particular have generated much excitement by offering fast processors, large screens and WebKit-based browsers.

But how does the rendering on tablets really standup? Sencha, which sells mobile development tools, has tested HTML5 rendering on the iPad 2, Xoom, Galaxy Tab and PlayBook to see how each one measures up.