Well, if failing to fully support their operating system  like they’ve promised us wasn’t enough sabotage, apparently the Nexus One’s hardware is starting to fail.  First, the screens are already starting to develop cracks in them after only months of having been released.  Upon inspection, apparently these cracks are a result of wear and tear from pressing buttons and (get this) being put in people’s pockets.  The representative actually said "people sometimes forget that they don't go in pockets."  Maybe companies sometimes forget that they DO go in pockets.  Only half of us have purses to carry our phones around in thank you very much.

 

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Well, when Google isn’t sabotaging itself, all that “wrench in the gears” mastery is artfully turned on their competitors.  If there’s one thing that they haven’t forgotten how to do, it’s how to ruin the day of someone charging for software that they think should be free.  This time, Google has upped the ante in their freeware crusade against Microsoft office by acquiring DocVerse.

 

There is one slight glimmer of hope left for HTC in their upcoming legal battle.  Google has publicly announced their support for HTC.  At first this may seem a bit strange, but it really shouldn’t be that surprising.  Not only have Google and Apple been feuding and taking potshots at each other for quite a while, but given the precedents at stake the Apple HTC suit is more of an attack on other smartphone providers as a whole than it is about HTC in particular.  What then happens if HTC successfully defends itself (perhaps with the help of Google)?

Google continues to get deeper and deeper into the app game. Just last week Google announced Google Earth Mobile for the Android Operating System. As if it wasn’t enough to be able to search via voice or typed search, the most recent addition to the Google App entourage is Gesture Search. Gesture Search allows users to search their phone’s contents with a few finger movements.

The announcement comes less than a month after Picnik claimed its one billionth edited photo. The Web based software allows users to edit photos from a variety of places where users store images online. The list includes your usual internet photo sharing sites such as Webshots and Photobucket, but it also includes social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. Picnik photo editing software has gained much familiarity and exposure in the online photo community because of the editing services it provides Flikr users.

The internet has brought a world of information to your fingertips and gone great lengths to connect people all over the world. The only problem is all of the Web’s contents don’t come in just one language. Yesterday Google Chrome introduced a new beta, which provides a new feature to help users navigate the multilingual web. The coolest feature added is the instant language translation of Web pages, without the need for any browser extensions or plug-ins.

Google Street View was launched in May 2007. The feature provides 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street level views within Google Maps. Over the past few years Google has used a variety of vehicles including cars, vans and most recently a pedal powered trike. Google collects the street view images using special cameras and equipment that capture and match images to a specific location using GPS devices. Today Google announced the results of their most recent Street View Trike Suggestion Contest.

Google offers an assortment of search features all of which are aimed at a particular search task to make online searching easier. When searching for local options though, Googlers have had mixed results. Yes you can use Google Local to find local restaurants, stores, etc.; but until now the only option for finding local information was entering a location in with your search phrase. That is until now.

Earlier this week Google announced that Google Earth was now available for the Android Operating System. Google Earth can be customized with the layers to match with the users individual interests. This takes Google one step deeper into the App game. Google even went as far as saying that this was the fastest version of Google Earth Mobile.

So Google wants to play the Apps game at the pro level now? What does this mean for the apps market exactly?  In a word: competition.  Android has been the jealous little brother to the iPhone's OSX.  It had its advantages, but it never had the  sheer mass of high quality apps to threaten to overtake its big bro.  Sure anyone can make and sell Android apps, but at the end of the day OSX had at least one professional level app for everything. Android had to make do with second tier open source.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, gave a speech during the recent Mobile World Congress Conference which publicly declared his company's intent to go “mobile first”. Schmidt went on for a while about the nature of the computing industry and how mobility is the wave of the future. In short it all boils down to two facts: global smartphone sales will soon overtake PC sales; and subsequently Google plans to be pumping out mobile apps like it’s nobody's business.

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At this point Google Voice is old news, although I do remember being on the wait list not too long ago. It’s been trumped not only by Google Wave, but most recently Google Buzz. As the Web spotlight shinned briefly on Voice, many users were left in the dark after the media focus changed. To solve the problem, Google just created a Google Voice YouTube Channel.

For a four week period YouTube was openly excepting ideas and feed back in their first ever Product Idea Series. The month long voting was put in place to give YouTube users a voice about what works, what doesn’t work, and what features could be added. In all, there was close to 3,000 ideas on YouTube’s Product Idea Series.

Late last week Google launched a newer, more search friendly version of Google Search for mobile devices.  If you use Google Search on your Android-powered device or iPhone, you'll see some changes to the look of the buttons, toolbars and search pages. The newer version has updated both the search home page and the search results.

As if Google Docs, mobile, translate, blog search, maps (should I keep going?) wasn’t enough Google has just released Google Buzz. Buzz is a no set up, real time information sharing tool with the ability to share videos, post status updates and more.