We wrote about Google’s Quick Search Box (QSB) a few months ago when the product was officially launched. We found the Twitter plug-in particularly interesting because QSB was able to turn into a Twitter app that let you post Tweets from the search box itself. Now, Google is launching a version of QSB for the Android Phone which provides similar functionality from the phone’s home screen.

QSB on the Android aims to cut down on keystrokes by providing suggestions as you type and provides a single search box to let you search a variety pf content on your phone, including apps, contacts, and browser history, as well as content from the web, like personalized search suggestions, local business listings, stock quotes, weather, and flight status. And QSB is intuitive; the search box will pull up items that you search for and use most often.

Israeli modular phone manufacturer, Modu, looks to be shaking things up with its next modular gadget – Modu 2. In a recent interview with TechRadar, Modu CEO, Dov Moran, has let (some of) the beans spill on Modu’s ambitions for its next generation of devices.

For anyone who is unfamiliar, Modu’s modular ecosystem includes various “jackets” which “create a new look and provide added functionality” to the underlying Modu phone. In the same way that you and I change our clothes based on our plans, Modu’s phone can change jackets for different functions, such as playing MP3s, taking digital photos, or at its simplest, changing its outward appearance with a dressy “suit” jacket.

We’ve seen a few different Android devices that seem to be VZW-bound over the last few weeks, but Verizon hasn’t said anything about the handsets or platform until now. The company has a webcast scheduled for later today but released a preemptive press release that outlines the basics.

(Full release after the jump)

We’ve covered a couple of Distimo reports in the past because they provide us with some valuable insights on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market based on the startup’s in-depth analysis of publicly available data. Now the company has added RIM’s Blackberry App World store to the fray, which gives us even more data points to compare the rivals’ app pricing and whatnot.

In the latest report (September 2009), Distimo notes software programs for Blackberry devices are considerably more expensive than comparable apps for competing devices/platforms.

In fact, the average price for apps is more than three times higher than the one for similar apps in the App Store and Android Market, which is sort of unbelievable. There’s not a single category where the average price of an app is lower than its equivalent on the latter two application storefronts, and the more serious, business-related tools are definitely much more expensive. (chart after the jump)

Turn-by-turn navigation was one of the features that iPhone users were most looking forward to with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software. Unfortunately, as users quickly found out, turn-by-turn meant either significantly more expensive apps, or a monthly fee. Not only does Waze do it for free, but it offers an interesting gaming element to boot.

The reason Waze can be free while other turn-by-turn apps are expensive is that their maps are entirely user-generated. Waze simply lays down a foundation and users build out the roads just by using the app. And the company makes it in your interest to help them not only by offering turn-by-turn functionality, but also by turning the mapping of uncharted areas into a game or sorts. If you’re on a road that no Waze user has mapped before, you will see little dots and your car icon will turn into a Pac-Man-like character, to eat the dots and collect points for it.

Tonight, Google’s Android platform is getting another application that gives it functionality iPhone users can only gaze at longingly. This time, it’s Ustream, a mobile streaming application that lets you broadcast video directly from your phone. The application will be available on the Android Market by 9 AM PST tomorrow morning.

Ustream isn’t the only option available for streaming video on Android — Qik launched its own version in June. But it’s a very solid debut that comes with some features that Qik doesn’t. CEO John Ham says that one key differentiator for the new Ustream app is the way it handles latency. While competitors can build up a ‘lag time’ over the course of an extended broadcast, Ham says that Ustream uses a low latency connection and optimization both client and server side to keep this to a minimum — in other words, the lag doesn’t build up. In my testing I got a lag time of around three seconds over a 3G connection (nothing to scoff at), and perhaps more importantly the delay didn’t grow over time, which is especially important if you’re going to interact with your viewers through the app’s various community features.

New research performed by online search advertising company Chitika suggests mobile users are far less likely to click on ads than non-mobile Internet users. In fact, they’re about half as likely, the study shows based on a sample of 92 million impressions.

Could that be true? Wasn’t it the other way around?

First, we should note right off the bat that Chitika is an Internet advertising company that’s decidedly not into mobile advertising according to its own website, so that brings along a large truck carrying bags filled with grains of salt. That said, it’s worth taking a look at how they got to the conclusion, so we can reach our own.

The much anticipated Facebook application for Android phones quietly launched this morning. Our review, including a video, are below.

This is an “official” Facebook app, the company tells us, even though the page says “This application was not developed by Facebook.” That’s because, as we previously reported, Google has actually built this themselves – obviously having a Facebook application was strategically important to them.

The application is, to put it magnanimously, “feature light.” There is no messaging at all, just the news stream, the ability to post status updates, and the ability to take/upload photos to Facebook. Most of the cool stuff iPhone users have with their 3.0 app just aren’t available for Android yet.

One thing it does well, though – it’s fast. When I was using an iPhone I always just went to Facebook via the browser because the app was way too slow to be usable. The Android app is brisk, and whisks you through the three or four functions quickly and without much of a hitch. Another nice feature are notifications of new events – since Android apps can run in the background you’ll optionally see this stuff even when you aren’t actively using the app.

One of the most exciting, gee-whiz features being developed for mobile phones right now are augmented reality browsers. Rather than fire up a mobile Web browser like Safari or Opera, these generally add an information layer over the world as seen through your phone’s camera lens. Last year at TechCrunch50, Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera wowed the crowd with its AR browser demo, Layar is creating a lot of buzz in Europe, and this summer AR technologies finally started to hit the market. You had Yelp sneak in an AR feature into its latest iPhone app, and a growing number of Android apps are embracing AR as well.

We are at the very early stages of what may very well become a common interface for mobile browsing, which means that it is still very primitive. You can only click on buildings or objects within your immediate view. Daniel Wagner, a virtual reality researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria, is proposing two ways to make AR browsing better: panoramic and bird’s-eye zooming.

In the mobile OS world, Google’s Android is still a challenger but with the amount of devices that will be running the system that are due to come out in the coming months alone in combination with its open approach it is definitely a contestant to watch closely. The success of Apple’s App Store for the iPhone / iPod Touch is often measured by how many apps have already been developed for the platform (around 70,000), but since Google doesn’t disclose exactly how many apps are available through Android Market it was difficult to compare the two on that particular level.

But thanks to AndroLib, which provides a useful website where you can browse Android apps from your computer (unlike the Android Market website), we can conclude that there are currently at least 10,000 applications and games available on the platform today.

Good news for Android developers: Google has just posted a video of the upcoming refresh for its Android Market, the online store that allows users to download new software to their Android phones. And the changes are very promising.

According to the understated Android blog post, developers will be able to include screenshots, promotional icons, and descriptions for their applications. The UI for the store, which we caught a glimpse of in some leaked photos earlier this week, is also much more polished. In other words, the store will now more closely resemble the iPhone’s App Store, which is not a bad thing.

T-Mobile UK this morning announced the Pulse, the first pay-as-you-go Android 1.5 smartphone and the third coming from the network operator.

Available for £180 starting October exclusively on T-Mobile, it boasts a 3.5″ HVGA touchscreen display, the biggest yet on an Android handset, a 3.2-megapixel camera and a TeleNav-powered GPS (more specs below).

The new device comes courtesy of Huawei, which had been rumored to be working with T-Mobile since displaying a device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year.

More details about the device:

The phone runs on a Qualcomm’s MSM7200A chipset and weighs 130g. It features a trackball and a 3.5″ HVGA touchscreen display with auto-rotation.

The T-Mobile Pulse also features a 3.2 mega pixel, auto-focus camera (no flash) that allows photos to be uploaded straight to the Internet, a 2GB internal memory and a micro SD card slot for storing media. The handset also offers access to corporate e-mail through the Road sync client, and boasts enhanced social networking and community features.

Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months. And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotions for Foursquare usage. But it has still been held back a bit by the fact that it has only had an iPhone app and a somewhat clunky mobile web interface. And Foursquare understood that, so it called for developers to help build its app for the other mobile platforms. Today, the first of those is ready to go: Foursquare for Android.

Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution.

Israeli startup Cellogic, makers of the fine FlyScreen software, have spent the last 8 months or so developing a custom version for the Android platform to complement their currently Symbian-exclusive version. Today, the company is debuting the private alpha version of the Android-compatible program, and we have 1,000 invites to offer for those carrying around HTC phones running Android 1.5 (it works on the Samsung Galaxy too but is less optimized for that particular device).

So what’s FlyScreen?

Essentially, a collection of expandable widgets that comprise syndicated content (such as TechCrunch) and small apps that hook into Twitter, Facebook etc. You can use it to fetch the RSS feed of your favorite blogs, and thus be able to quickly access previews of published content, tag articles for later reading or share posts on Twitter and/or Facebook in just one click.

Here at TechCrunch there’s a daily argument in the office, on Yammer and even on the blog about the supremacy of the iPhone versus the Google-Voice-goodness of Android phones. I chalked it up to the usual get-off-my-lawn-style ranting of Michael Arrington, and assumed the average techie was still like MG Siegler– a total Mac-head who will love the iPhone no matter how bad the reception, how bad the battery life and how many times it breaks and he has to get a new one.

But some reporters– long harassed by Mac fan boys when they’ve dared to criticize the company (read: do their jobs) — are saying a sea change is occurring in Apple fan boy nation. Witness Jon Fortt of Fortune’s recent blog post where he says the Valley owes Microsoft an apology and compares Apple to Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm.

AdMob is out with its latest Mobile Metrics Report, this time combining its readily available network data with survey results from over 1,000 users of iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Just for your reference, AdMob claims to serve ads for more than 7,000 mobile Web sites and 3,000 applications around the world.

Key takeaways from the July report, with some commentary of my own after the jump.

If you think the posts about me quitting the iPhone are just a stunt, think again. I’ve been using the TMobile myTouch for a couple of weeks now and haven’t looked back at the iPhone at all (background apps + full Google Voice Integration is awesome). But resident Apple fanboi and general iPhone enthusiast MG Siegler refuses to agree that Android > iPhone. We spend hours debating it internally on Yammer, although mostly we devolve into personal attacks. Comments like the one to the left are about as deep as MG is able to dive.

A thread from earlier today is below. Read from the bottom up – the post I refer to, which basically describes MG perfectly, is here:

Let’s not beat around the bush: The G1 was not a very good phone. That’s not to say Android isn’t a good mobile OS — it is, it’s just that the initial hardware built to run the OS didn’t do it justice. It was poorly designed and had a fairly cheap feel. And now, it appears that the G1 may already be on its last legs as Android engineers aren’t sure if the phone will be able to handle the upcoming updates to the Android OS.

While nothing is set in stone yet, it’s looking pretty grim. The latest “Cupcake” Android update apparently pushed the G1’s memory to the limit. And subsequent updates should only require more. But what’s crazy about this is that the G1 was launched just 10 months ago. Certainly, the devices will keep working with the current flavor of Android, but just imagine the pain early adopters must feel if their device is already a dinosaur that they can’t upgrade, not yet a year into its release.

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.

Well, we never thought it would happen because of its intense rivalry with Google, but Facebook is almost ready to launch an official app for Android phones. Hints are already popping up here and there, but I’ve been able to confirm it. The app could hit the Android Market (its version of the App Store) as soon as the end of this week.

Facebook’s Android app will launch with a more limited set of features than its current, and very popular, iPhone app. For instance, it won’t have an inbox, I’m told by a source who has seen it. But it will have the full Facebook stream, which is really all you need. The Facebook Android app is built around the stream and status updates. It was built with Facebook’s new Stream API. Your updates keep coming in, with a notification number telling you how many new items are available at any given time.