When Android made its handset debut on the T-Mobile G1 back in October of 2008, a nasty bout of drama between Facebook and Google kept the former from developing on the nascent platform. 9 months later, Facebook took a look at the ever growing number of Android handsets and decided to move past the politics. Our sources indicated that work on the Facebook Android app had began, with at least one Google engineer lending a hand.

Facebook has yet to officially acknowledge that an Android port is in progress, but a series of leaked screenshots suggest that it’s well underway.

Native Apps, or Web Apps? It’s the great debate of the mobile world right now, essentially fueling the platform wars from behind the scenes. Palm took the Web App route with the Pre and webOS, though with the SDK just now available to all its a bit too early to gauge that decision. The iPhone began its life with Web Apps, only to later open up native support and become the apotheosis of how app development and distribution can be done. Even Google, who will try to jam just about anything into the cloud, is putting a lot of weight behind running things locally on their Android platform.

Still, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra says Web Apps are the way.

And yet another game of cat and mouse begins.

Over the past 24 hours, Apple has released updates for both iTunes and the iPhone beta SDK. While both are seemingly minor on the feature front, each packs a bit of disappointment for those who had been using loopholes to their advantage.

Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You’d be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.

I’ve had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device – but I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking – some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.

I wasn’t missing anything.

No one likes limitations. Though Apple has been opening up more and more of their API with each software update, a good chunk of it is still off limits to anyone outside of their own team of developers. Be it because they’re unstable, unproven, or just outright blacklisted, a number of methods exist that no one but Apple is supposed to use.

Of course, people try to use them anyway. Some (like Google) succeed. Others don’t. The practice of playing with verboten methods is heavily frowned upon – but if a newly discovered private method is any indication, Apple’s at least got a sense of humor about it.

Dongles. In-line adapters. Proprietary headset ports. If it’s an audio port on a mobile handset and it’s not 3.5mm, it’s junk. As we declared back in May, we’re done with all of it.

Now HTC, sire of the T-Mobile G1, myTouch, and countless other smartphones plagued by non-3.5mm jacks, is done with it too.

Uh-oh. Looks like the race for live video streaming on Android is on. When we got footage of Kyte running on Android last week after hearing next to nothing on the matter from the competitors, we guessed that it might be the first mobile streaming app to go live on the platform. Turns out, Qik has had something up their sleeve – and it just slipped right out.

We’re not quite clear on all of the details yet, but an early Alpha version of Qik’s Android application has become available.

No, no – that headline wasn’t intended as commentary on the hygiene of Android users (though if a good chunk of the Android devotees I know are any indication, it very well could be. Zing!) Earlier this morning, mobile analytics group Flurry gave us an exclusive sneak peek at their Smart Phone Industry Pulse report for June. Flurry’s June report harvests data from 1,100 applications running across 4 platforms (iPhone OS, BlackBerry, JavaME, and Android) on over 40 million handsets, and sheds a bit of light on the usage habits (stickiness included) of smart phone users over the past few months.

Before we start this first look, there’s something I have to admit: I hate most mobile IM clients. We see a whole lot of phones go in and out of the MobileCrunch office, each generally toting its own crappy, broken instant messaging suite. Be they slow, flakey, or just outright terribly designed, we’ve grown to have a nearly unshakable bias against them.

With that in mind, know this: We love BeeJive 3.0 on the iPhone, which should be hitting the App Store later today.

Here it is, folks. At long last, version 3.0 of the iPhone OS has launched here in the US, bringing with it just about every feature the phone should have had from the start – and a whole lot more.

If you hadn’t already coaxed an iPhone developer into letting you piggyback on their account or (gasp!) actually shelled out for a developers membership, the past 3 months have probably been pretty grueling. You read the blogs, and kept up on every new feature to be uncovered. Maybe you even made a list of all the things you wanted to check out first. No? Well, here you go.

iPhone OS 3.0? Pah! Baseband 2.30.03? Ain’t got nothin’. This evening, the iPhone Dev Team displayed their inimitable talents with a live video demonstration of yellowsn0w’s
big, bad, unstoppable brother: ultrasn0w.

They’re keeping mum on the details to make sure it’s all still working come Friday’s iPhone 3G S launch, though there’s no saying for sure whether or not this crack will work on Apple’s latest hardware. For every other release to date, however, it should be a breeze. Be on the lookout for a release by the end of the work week.

A video of the live demonstration is tucked away behind the jump.

The Android userbase may not be quite as big as that of iPhone OS – but man, they are one loud bunch. More so than any smartphone platform past, users of these two operating systems tend to consider themselves rivals of sorts; if you release an application for one, users of the other will begin to clamor almost immediately.

It’s been about 8 months since the launch of their iPhone app, but geo-centric social network Brightkite is about to hush the calls of Android-toting Brightkite users everywhere. Brightkite’s CMO and Co-Founder Rob Lawson just wrote in to let us know that Brightkite’s Android debut should be submitted to the Android Market within the next few days, hopefully going live to all sometime within the next week.

We’ve spent a bit of time with the upcoming Android release in its beta form. Read on for our first impressions – or better yet, read on to find out how you can get beta access as well.

When Apple announced the iPhone 3G S yesterday, some folks were shocked — or disappointed, even — that the new one was a spitting image of the last one. Width, height, depth – besides being 2 whole grams heavier, the physical specs were a perfect match.

We’ve been reminded of this fact roughly 300 times this morning, as every case manufacturer and battery-pack maker from here to Hong Kong writes in to “announce compatibility with the iPhone 3G S”. We get it, guys. Nothing changed, so your case still fits.

That said, it got us to thinking: what other accessories from the last generation iPhone will still work with this upcoming one? So, we compiled a list. It’s not exhaustive, of course – but it covers all of the ones you’re most likely worried about.

With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enough: Beginning with this morning’s release of the North American model N97, Qik will come preloaded onto all Nokia S60-based phones.

In early June 2007, Palm was teetering on the edge of obscurity. Their flagship Treo product line had gone stale, numbers were down across the board, and rumors of a sale were abound. On June 4th, 2007 it was announced that Elevation Partners had purchased a 25% equity stake of Palm for $325 million. Flash forward to today; just two years later (almost to the day), Palm has launched the Pre, a phone which managed to nab the attention of just about every blog and blog reader out there.

So what changed? What had that new-found $325 million bought them? Talent. Lots and lots of talent – from their competitors, no less. With a good amount of lucky timing and some decent salary proposals, Palm managed to snatch up at least 8 people who were just oh-so-damn good at what they do, ending up with the Palm Pre and webOS as a result.

Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes, we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone, along with the phones that require them.

There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace.

Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought – but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

After 473 days of beta testing and many, many preliminary releases, the rich multimedia mobile browser Skyfire has just hit version 1.0. Though Skyfire’s biggest features (namely, its ability to handle formats like Flash and Silverlight) have been in since its early days, there’s enough polish and primp in this release to justify branding it with a whole number.

Move over, Nokia N97. Your bigger, badder, unannounced brother is on the way – and one of our sources at Nokia has just clued us in on all of the details, from worldwide launch targets to hardware specs.

Nokia’s next tablet device is designed in the same vein as their N810, albeit significantly more polished. Though it doesn’t appear to have an official name as of yet, it’s referred to internally as “N900″, “Rover”, or “Maemo Flagship”. We’ll be referring to this device as the N900 for the rest of this post, though it’s quite possible that this name will change.

Not too long ago, Google added voice recognition to their iPhone search application. Not one to be behind the times, Yahoo! has gone and immediately done the same.

Well, that’s what we should have been able to say. Instead, Yahoo’s voice recognition add-on comes nearly 6 months after Google’s. Of course, Yahoo’s application is a bit more complex than Google’s, being that it also handles news, aggregates various social sites, and a good amount more beyond search. But search is Yahoo’s main gig. Combined with the fact that everyone hates typing, Yahoo should have done this ages ago.

Yahoo’s implementation is quite different than Googles – for better or worse.

After we broke the news this morning that Nokia was cracking away at a phone-friendly and potentially ad-supported version of their Internet tablet OS, Maemo, we figured we might be able to swing a screenshot.

Sure enough, our source came through. With that, we present the world’s first ever look at the mobile OS Nokia tentatively plans on launching around the end of 2010: Maemo Harmattan.

We only just opened the MobileCrunch Tips Line, and the stories are already pouring in. Keep’em coming, guys.

According to a source close to the matter, popular iPhone fitness app RunKeeper will soon be seeing a rebranding and website overhaul. We’ve obtained a screenshot showing most of the major changes, all of which seem to be visual at this point – but if nothing else, at least it’ll look pretty while you’re trying to de-fat yourself.

If your carrier offered to take a hefty chunk of change off the cost of a mobile handset be it that you let them put advertisements on the home screen, would you take the deal? Nokia thinks you might.

Our source deep within Nokia’s headquarters has just leaked us a bunch of information about the company’s future operating system release, Maemo “Harmattan”. It’s jam-packed full of unexpected twists, including their new-found love for home screen ads.

And so it begins. With WWDC and presumably the release of iPhone OS 3.0 just around the corner, Apple has deemed it time to begin stress-testing their Push Notification servers. We just received a letter from a (very) trusted source, in which Apple invited them to download a pre-release version of the Associated Press iPhone application, specifically tuned to make a high number of background push requests.

Upon adding the application, an iPhone-wide “Notifications” toggle is added to the iPhone OS 3.0 Settings screen, along with the option to toggle Notifications on an app-by-app basis. Screenshots and the full text of the letter available after the jump.

After the slightly shaky launch of their ultra-early milestone one release, Mozilla is back with more Fennec (otherwise known as “Firefox Mobile”) goodness. This morning, the company began distributing Alpha 1 of Fennec for Windows Mobile. As with all Alphas, this release is by no means intended for every day use by the general public, but it gives us a sneak peak at what’s to come.

Just weeks ago, Google unveiled a polished up version of Product Search for Android handsets. Near the tail-end of the post, we postulated that Google would add barcode scanning support to Product Search soon. Such services have already proven quite popular on Android already, with the success of applications like ShopSavvy and CompareEverywhere.

Sure enough, Google is announcing this morning that Google Product Search for Android now has barcode scanning support. If you’re looking to price compare a product that’s right in front of you, why type out its name and dig through irrelevant results when you can just scan the barcode?