Jake Smith

Prior to its announcement this evening alongside Ice Cream Sandwich, the Nexus Prime has been leaked on Samsung’s website with Verizon as the carrier. Check it out yourself, before we cover the event tonight at 10 PM EST. More to come!

via This is my next

We just got back from the Motorola/Verizon event where the Motorola RAZR was announced. Along with the RAZR, Motorola announced a full line-up of accessories (as seen above). The most notable, as we mentioned on 9to5mac, is the lapdock that looks closely to the MacBook Pro. There are two versions of the Lapdock: the Lapdock 100 and Lapdock 500 Pro (hmm..). The Lapdock 500 pro features a larger 14-inch screen, VGA out, and wider keyboard.

Other accessories include a Bluetooth headset, Universal Travel Charger, Portable Power Pack, Navigation Dock, Wireless Keyboard, and Wireless Keyboard w/ touchpad. For TV connectivity, Motorola has unveiled the HD Station, HD dock, and Smart Controller. What a perfect combo for the living room.

Pre-orders for the RAZR start October 27 for $299 with an expected launch sometime in November. We’ll have a full review up then, and it’s sure to be a good one!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKuUzNnb8aQ]

As promised, Google has announced more merchants to the Wallet program, giving users more choice. The new merchants include American Eagle Outfitters, The Container Store, Foot Locker, Guess, Jamba Juice, Macy’s, OfficeMax, and Toys“R”Us. These merchants also bring something new to the Wallet table, and that is the ability to redeem coupons and earn rewards points when you checkout. The Wallet app has also been updated to support that with deals today.

As you can see in the video above, people are excited for the new platform. Google Wallet is currently available to only Nexus S users, but might roll out to Nexus Prime users when it is announced this week. Check out what else Wallet could do.

Droid Life has discovered the above image in Motorola’s teaser site we told you about this morning. The above image confirms what we already know: a thin, 4G enabled device, that features a kevlar coating and a relatively large screen. For now gaze on this picture in awe, but tomorrow Motorola and Verizon will ease our waiting by officially announcing this device.

A few members of the Google Maps team answered some pretty interesting questions on Reddit about the platform, from the community. Business Insider posted some of the highlights from the thread:

1. Building shadows within Maps are astronomically correct with the time of day and sun. Google did however scale the shadows.
2. Antartica has a street view in Google Maps.
3. Google collects 3D views with three laser cameras on their street cars.
4. The team is excited about/considering making a 3D game using Maps data.
5. Google Maps has a street view partner program for anyone to add street view photos taken with their own camera.
6. For colorblind Maps users, Google is figuring out how to accommodate users with the red and green indicators for Traffic.
7. Google favors higher quality images that are older over blurry ones that are newer.

Motorola has sent out invites to 16 different blogs to unlock more pieces to their new RAZR teaser site. The RAZR is the next Android device to be featured on Verizon Wireless. As each blog enters in their unique code a new piece of information about the phone will be revealed. Motorola did something similar with the Bionic, revealing a video that told all about the LTE beast.

The only blog to enter in their code so far is Mobile Burn who learned that the RAZR will feature a kevlar coating. We’ll be looking out for more websites as they come.

The Motorola RAZR will be announced the day before the Nexus Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich, which will be announced by Samsung/Google in Hong Kong.

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According to a tweet by the official Google Voice Twitter account, Google has pulled the Voice for iOS app from the iTunes App Store. Google decided to pull the app due to its crashing on startup, which was introduced with iOS 5 (Couldn’t sort it out in 3 months of iOS5Beta?). Google says hang tight for the time being, because they’ll be updating/rereleasing the app again. Tweet:

Removed the iPhone app from the App store. We’ll have a new version for you ASAP with a fix for the sign in bug.

There also appears to be some issues with Sprint’s use of Google Voice causing iMessages to get confused.  Apple has a Support document for that (below).
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Android Police has gotten exclusive screenshots of the Gmail, Calendar, and Email widgets for the upcoming Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. As you can see with the Gmail widget above, the Ice Cream Sandwich version features a slightly upgraded UI, but is missing Labels. Below is calendars
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During their earnings call Thursday, Google announced that there have been 190 million Android handsets activated. Interestingly, if you look at the numbers on Android’s Developer page, 1.5% of all devices that accessed the market within the last 30 days are running Honeycomb — the almost exclusive OS for Android tablets (well, excluding a few million Samsung Galaxy Tab 7s and other tablets running 2.x Android). So, if all 190 million of those devices accessed the market in the last 30 days, that leaves only 3.4 million Honeycomb tablets on the market if you do the math. Ouch..

With all of the numbers added up, it’s indicating that Android still has some catch up to do against the big Apple when it comes to tablets. Perhaps Ice Cream Sandwich will help with that.
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Google just announced on their Voice Blog that Sprint subscribers who use Google Voice can now use MMS, a highly requested feature among users. The multi-media messages will appear on Sprint user’s mobile phones and will be forwarded to their email if they request it. Google is also working on displaying these images inside of the Voice website.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve made the first step in our efforts to bring this feature to our users. Google Voice users are now able to receive pictures and other multimedia messages from Sprint subscribers. The multimedia attachments will display on their mobile forwarding phone and in their email inbox when they enable text to email forwarding in their Google Voice settings. We are also planning on making them display in the Google Voice inbox.

Google says they aren’t going to stop at Sprint, however, and are working towards adding new carriers to the mix as they become availble. Sprint users, enjoy!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX4btquQzUE]

As customary with all new versions of Android, Google just erected their new Ice Cream Sandwich statue on front lawn to build hype before its release. Ice Cream Sandwich is expected to be announced on October 19th in Hong Kong, along with Samsung’s Nexus Prime.

Google has just announced on their blog that they will be shutting down Google Buzz in a few weeks. Users will be able to take out their data from Buzz with Google Takeout, but it will still be viewable on their Google Profile.

In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.

Google also announced a slew of other products that will be closed in January of 2012, including Code Search, Jaiku, and iGoogle’s social features.

So what’s up with all of these product closures? As explained before, and also in yesterday’s earnings call, Google is trying to put more focus around core products. In today’s case it looks like these products will allow the Google team to focus more on Google+. I think we’re all fine with that, right?

Google has just announced their Q3 earnings, just shortly before their earnings call this afternoon. Google is now reporting $9.72 billion in revenue for Q3 — up 33% versus Q3 2010. That leaves Google’s net income for Q3 $2.73 billion. Just as Wall Street is hearing these numbers, Google’s stock has jumped 30 points in after hours trading (and climbing).

Google also announced that since opening Google+ to the public the service is now boasting 40 million users.

Other interesting points to note are that Google now has $42.6 billion in the bank and a total of 31,000 employees world-wide.

We’re live blogging the announcement, join in!

Press release after the break:

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(Update: Over, check it out after the break) Starting at 4:30 ET, Google will be hosting their quarterly earnings call to discuss Q3 earnings with investors. We’ll be updating below when the call starts, or you can listen in here. Stay tuned!

Larry Page, Patrick Pichette, Nikesh Arora, and Susan Wojcicki will be hosting the call — starting in just a few minutes.

Follow along after the break:

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Claiming Samsung copied the iPad’s design, Apple has successfully achieved their mission in getting an Australian judge to block Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 from being sold in Australia, reports Sydney Morning Herald. Apple says that Samsung is infringing on two patents, and the judge ruled until changes are made the Galaxy Tab 10.1 can’t be sold from this point on.

Apple and Samsung have current litigation continuing over in Europe and the United States. Apple has already successfully blocked the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany and hopes to do so elsewhere.

Samsung won’t start addressing the core patent issue (screen patent) with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 quite yet. They want to prepare a proper defense against Apple.  The fight continues.

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Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt has finally joined Google+ this evening, but a couple of Google’s senior executives are still missing. As TechCrunch points out, Schmidt could have been on Google+ but not sharing publicly. Schmidt’s first post was links to where he shared his thoughts on Steve Jobs.

Finally, Schmidt has joined his Google brothers Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beFP0REw3DM]

Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra just announced on Google+ this afternoon that Google+ is now rolling out real-time search and improved hashtags. Gundotra explains in the video above, and in his post:

Real-time search
Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available. If you click on this message, or select “Most recent”, then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.

Improved hashtag support
People have long used hashtags to mark their posts with certain topics — just ask our very own +Chris Messina, hashtag inventor. You don’t have to use hashtags on Google+ (search works fine without them), but when you do, we’ll automatically link to search results.

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Amazon is currently running a Verizon Wireless smartphone special that is certainly too hard to pass up. Everyone of Verizon’s current smartphone lineup is included, making each phone cost only a penny. This sale even includes the widely popular and powerful Droid Bionic and HTC Thunderbolt.

This offer ends from now until midnight October 17th, so take advantage of it while you can!

More coverage on 9to5toys.com

The Nexus Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) will be announced in Hong Kong on October 19th, if a new report from Engadget is true. Both products would be announced by Samsung and Google at AllThingsD’s Asia conference, the report mentions. The Nexus Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich were originally scheduled to be announced yesterday, but were delayed out of respect for the passing of Apple’s Steve Jobs.

There have been other rumors floating around that the Nexus Prime will go on sale, on Verizon Wireless, November 3rd. Ice Cream Sandwich would also land that day, too.

In attempt to grow their young social network, Google has taken out a full page ad in the traditional print version of the New York Times promoting Google+ Hangouts. Search Engine Land posted the photo above, where Google talks about the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu hosting a Hangout last week in their ad. Google strikes out parts to explain how they came to the rescue when the Dalai Lama wasn’t granted a visa to visit South Africa.

Google’s decision to take out a full ad was definitely smart. Yesterday numbers were published by an analyst showing how much of Google+’s traffic is beginning to decline, but maybe spreading the social network to a different set of people will help. That ad is great and all, but why didn’t Google use some images to catch the eye?

What once used to send you to Picasa Web Albums, the “photos” link on Google’s navigation bar now sends you to Google+’s Photo service — Google Operating System discovered. Google+’s Photo service displays photos from your circles, from your Android phone, photo’s you’ve been tagged in, and your list of Picasa Web albums. Google+ Photos is still missing some editing features, album descriptions, and the ability to edit prints.

Don’t get this confused however, as Picasa is still available by manually typing in the URL. But, this seems for the best, right?