"Technology should do the hard work so people can get on doing the things that make them happiest in life," Page told a crowd of 6,000 software developers and entrepreneurs who flocked to San Francisco Wednesday for the opening day of Google's annual showcase for its latest breakthroughs.

In the latest display of its technological prowess and sweeping ambition, Google is rolling out another wave of products and services that will test how much more people want computers to control their lives and enhance their perceptions of reality.

This year's event mostly consisted of upgrades to existing Google services that have already become daily habits for millions of people - one of Page's main goals. The new features assume most people want more help managing their lives from Google's brainy engineers and the sprawling data centers that house its millions of computers around the world.

Investors are increasingly becoming convinced that Google's tentacles are going to grasp more moneymaking opportunities as its dominant search engine and ancillary services become more pervasive on the mobile devices.

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As noted by Jeff Bercovici at Forbes, "Home is a suite of apps that, together, constitute an interface for Android users willing to let Facebook mediate pretty much everything they do on their mobile devices."

Here is how the "not" app, "not" operating system works, according to The Examiner:

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Advertisers are not far behind. Though mobile ads have been a big concern for Facebook's investors since before the company's initial public offering last May, some of that worry has subsided as Facebook began muscling its way into the market.

Last year, the company began showing ads to its mobile audience by splicing corporate sponsorships and content into users' news feeds, which also includes updates from friends and brands they follow. Among the challenges Facebook faces now is showing people mobile ads without annoying or alienating them.

The mobile advertisement market is growing quickly. That's thanks in large part to Facebook and Twitter, which also entered the space in 2012. Research firm eMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion, from $4.11 billion last year.

As for Thursday's event at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, speculation has centered on a mobile phone, made by HTC Corp., that deeply integrates Facebook into the Android operating system. The move comes as Facebook works to evolve from its Web-based roots to a "mobile-first" company, as its mantra goes.

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This data correlates almost perfectly with the 2007 debut of the iPhone, and the subsequent ascent of sophisticated Android phones. While BlackBerrys existed before 2006, it was with the Apple product that smartphones began their rapid evolution from communication devices to full-on distraction machines equipped with devilishly addictive casual games like Angry Birds and the capacity to, for example, play video or obsess over social media. Twitter also had its breakout moment in 2007 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Talking on the phone has lost cachet. Talking is just another thing people do on their phones.

The number of adults who admit to being scolded or shamed for their own obnoxious talking was far lower, at 6 percent, down a mere 2 percent from 2006. Technology might change but human nature remains the same.

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As Apple stock continues it’s a long steep slide, investors and market watchers are speculating about whether the Cupertino, Calif.-based company can regain the mojo that made it a market favorite. But a report in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) suggests that the Android platform, now installed on three out of four smartphones sold worldwide, is exercising a gravitational pull on app developers.

Google’s Android has long lagged behind Apple in the number of available apps and the number of apps sold, but the balance appears to be shifting. “Android is the platform of growth,” Misha Lyalin, CEO of Zeptolab, which puts out the popular game “Cut the Rope” told the paper.

The article quotes one techie who personifies the platform rift:

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The push, noted CNET, appears to be underpinned by the fact that Android controls a far larger percentage of the smartphone market than Apple:

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According to a release from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) -- a partnership between the FBI and the Nation White Collar Crime Center -- the malware steals contact details from the user's address book and phone number. Another malicious application noted by IC3, "FinFisher," works to remotely control and monitor an infected device.

However, ZDNet's Stephen Vaughan-Nichols has been swift to decry FBI warnings as "badly written," noting that the malware has little to do with a problem in Android security, but relies on user mistakes:

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When the beta version of "Dog Wars" became available on Android earlier this month, it swiftly sparked outrage for its cruel premise: giving players the opportunity to "feed, water, train, and FIGHT your virtual dog against another player's." The app, by Kage Games, has attracted the attention of actress and animal rights advocate Alicia Silverstone, who wrote an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page stating that "I join PETA's millions of members in imploring you to cancel this game immediately. If one dog dies as a result of this game, you will not forgive yourself." And Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick, who served nearly two years in jail for his role in a dogfighting ring, continued his campaign against the practice by issuing a statement via the Humane Society: "I've come to learn the hard way that dog fighting is a dead-end street. Now, I am on the right side of this issue, and I think it's important to send the smart message to kids, and not glorify this form of animal cruelty, even in an Android app." The sentiment was echoed among gamers – commenters on Google's Android forum were generally in consensus over its status as "most offensive game ever."

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So all's terrific for Android? Maybe. Although the overall trajectory is clearly positive, the long-range prospects remain decidedly mixed -- and the major responsibility rests with Google itself.

Let's check the positive side of the ledger first. Techies smirk and snark at Consumer Reports' ratings of electronics, especially computers, because they consider the reviews shallow and generally uninformed. You want gadget reviews, they say, then go to the sites that publish zillion-word reviews of even niche gear.

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But I do wonder what Friedman et al. would make of Jimmy Lai's Taiwan animation operation -- a division of his Apple Daily newspaper that may best be described as cyberpunk tabloid journalism. Hilarious, irreverent, kind of true, a YouTube click or two away at any moment, and maybe just a little horrifying, from an old-school news business perspective.  If this is how journalism is going to survive the business model disruptions wrought by the Internet, well then, the workings of the free market are about to deliver a future that is just plain weird.

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The 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab is ready to compete with the insanely successful iPad, and with its unrestricted applications, multitasking capability, and larger storage capacity, it might prove itself to be a contender. Side-by-side comparisons are already flooding the Internet, and the technical specs are being dissected by the nerdiest of us all. The Galaxy Tab made its debut at the IFA Consumer Electronics show in Berlin today, and was only one of numerous gadgety reveals. An astute Guardian columnist writes about the sweet spot for tablet screens and batteries. Toshiba has its mind on pulverizing the iPad as well. We want a fair fight, ladies. No scratching.

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Soon after the phone's launch last week, word circulated on tech website Mobile Crunch of users struggling to maintain a signal, which other reviews and user comments now confirm. The chief complaint so far is that the reception bar fluctuates dramatically ... even when the phone is sitting still. Sorry, Motorola, you can't blame this on "holding it wrong." There are also reports of a limited battery life, although signal hunting is known to drain cellphone batteries. Are these problems simply defects from the first batch of phones, or are Motorola and Verizon facing a major P.R. embarrassment?

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Sales of smart phones in general rose 50 percent in Q2, and Fortune predicts phones will outsell PCs in short order. CNET details the rise in HTC device sales, and Fast Company takes a look at Motorola's weak results, despite its Droid phones.

In other smart phone news, India has reached the end of its rope with BlackBerry over monitoring within its borders, PC World is talking about the development of a phone for gamers, and ZDNet is covering the Samsung Epic 4G pre-orders that begin tomorrow.

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But is there an Achilles' heel to too much configurability? What if manufacturers replace all of Google's add-on functionality with their own? Where's the win for Google?

A hint of just such a scenario is discernible within a Monday TechCrunch post arguing "Android Poised for Dominance in China, With Global Implications."

That's right, China — Google's search engine censor bête noire. A country that sees Facebook as a U.S. tool for intervention in domestic affairs, routinely shuts down popular blogs and microblogging services, and in general does its absolute best to keep a lid on the Internet. At first glance, one might be excused for wondering whether Google's license-to-anyone open-source Android strategy fits comfortably into China's top-down control model.

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Back in the 1980s, Apple Computer (as it was known then) released a product called Hypercard. It was an easy-to-use programming tool, based on a simple and elegant programming language called HyperTalk, combining databases and a graphical display to create applications called "stacks." Programmers and non-programmers alike flocked to it, and created a huge variety of stacks that ranged from useful to quirky.

In the 1990s, Microsoft released Visual Basic. It, too, greatly simplified the programming process and was adopted by vast numbers of people -- many inside large enterprises -- whose work reinforced the Windows monopoly.

In the past decade, Web development took on some of the same qualities, giving average people ways to create applications to run on the Web with great ease and simplicity. Blogger, Wordpress and Drupal, among others, became the content-management systems of choice, for example, and Yahoo's brilliant Pipes let people do sophisticated mashups without knowing a line of Java or other popular languages.

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As noted several days ago, problems in an intercontinental fiber-optic cable have caused Internet outages for a lot of folks in South Africa this week. Those of us attending the Highway Africa and World Journalism Education Congress meetings were among the mostly disconnected.

But not completely in my case, due to a truly nifty feature in the latest version of its Android mobile operating system: The phone becomes a Wi-Fi hotspot. It's simply a matter of going to the Settings and turning it on.

I'd already bought a local SIM card and a voice/data plan -- total cost about $75 for ample voice time plus 2 gigabytes of data -- for the two weeks we were scheduled to be in the country. I didn't want to pay the outrageous Internet charges hotels tend to charge in much of the world, and also knew we'd be visiting some non-urban areas; the mobile networks do a comprehensive job of covering the country, and in a pinch, I figured, this would suffice. The pinch became a crunch with the cable failure, making the investment an even better one than I'd anticipated.

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Tim O'Reilly echoes that sentiment, adding that "Gmail is so good on the phone that I can, for the first time, imagine being totally without my laptop."

As always, Mossberg runs the phone through its paces as a gadget, but O'Reilly offers the more interesting analysis, contrasting the way Google is embedding the phone into the Web with how Apple still operates on a more PC-based platform. O'Reilly believes that in the long run, devices that can take advantage of the "big" data possibilities inherent in cloud computing will win out. The Nexus One, he writes, is "a connected device in a way that is more fundamental than any previous phone."

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Last week the firm unveiled Android, the programming platform it hopes will soon find a home on a phone near you.

Openness is the soul of Android's charm: Unlike most phones today, devices running Android will be able to run applications created by third-party developers. Google hopes to create on the phone the sort of open programming culture that's made the Web so great -- great for all of us as well as for Google's bottom line.

Today Google put out a sneak peek at Android in the form of an SDK -- a software developers kit that will help programmers get used to making things for Android phones.

The company also announced $10 million in prizes for developers who build great Android programs. The Android Developers Challenge offers 50 prizes of $25,000 each for the best programs submitted by March 3; some among those 50 will then go on to compete for greater prizes of $100,000 and $275,000.

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Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "Chick-sent-me-hi-yee") is digressing from the topic at hand, which is his explanation of why he has built a satellite-linked, Net-operated robot that he intends to send into a combat zone ASAP. Since the invasion of Grenada, he notes, the U.S. Armed Forces have limited journalists' access to areas where fighting is taking place, and he finds this troubling, to say the least. He thinks the "pre-censored" war coverage on CNN is as one-sided as Rambo III, and he's especially terrified by the recent news that an unmanned Predator drone fired upon and killed three men who may turn out to be Afghan civilians -- a sure sign, he says, that we need to expand public discussion of the use of unmanned war machines.

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