A perennial runner-up in the PC chip race, AMD has for long dithered on entering the mobile and embedded chip segment. Back in September, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told Fortune Magazine that his company has no immediate plans of entering this increasingly lucrative sector dominated by ARM’s chip designs. However, he did concede that his company is “developing the technology that will, over time, address these markets,” and qualified his comment as being a “not now” statement.

Hazy mobile plans notwithstanding, the chip maker has signed up for the MeeGO mobile operating system project. It will be lending its engineering expertise to the open source Linux-based OS project, which already includes the likes of Intel, Nokia and the Linux Foundation as its backers.

“MeeGo represents an exciting, open-source mobile operating system we expect to be adopted by mobile and embedded device makers over time,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, software development, AMD. “We are glad to provide engineering resources to joint industry efforts like MeeGo and expect that this operating system will help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units.”

Microsoft had originally planned to release Windows Mobile 7 in 2009. But it then pushed the release to 2010. The cutthroat nature of the smartphone market offers very little leeway for such delays. Besides, WinMo 7 is supposed to be a product that will bring Windows phones up to speed with other contemporary smartphones.

The delay left Microsoft with no choice but to plug Windows 6.5, an interim release, in a manner only accorded to a major release. It is clearly a gambit to prevent WinMo loyalists from abandoning the terribly long road to WinMo 7.

Just days before the much hyped global launch of Windows Mobile 6.5, Steve Ballmer could be heard criticizing the company's mobile platform at the Microsoft Venture Capitalist Summit last week. No journalists had been invited to the event.
"Ballmer said they screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already launched WM7. They completely revamped the team," tweeted Paul Jozefak, a venture capitalist, from the event floor.

Google Mobile App is now available on Windows Mobile. It is basically a search application with an ambiguous name. The Google Mobile App spares lazy mobile users the trouble of opening their browser for initiating an online search.

You might want to know about the amount of time that can be saved with this app. According to Google, it is possible to get "search results for identical queries nearly 50% faster from Google Mobile App than from navigating to google.com in the mobile browser."

The search application can not only be accessed directly from the start menu, but it is also possible to summon it to action while another application is active by pressing a shortcut key assigned to it (assigned by the user).

There are not too many reasons for WM users to overlook this application. Apart from search, the Google Mobile App also provides instant access to many other popular web services, including Google Maps, Gmail and Google News.

Google’s chief of mobile platforms Andy Rubin seems to believe the cliché ‘first impression is the last impression’. He told Reuters that the success of the Android platform would depend on the reception of its first phone. He believes that there is very little margin for failure as far as the first Android phone goes - first impression. The first Android phone will be T-Mobile’s HTC Dream, and is rumored to be scheduled for release later this month.