During Google’s third quarter earnings conference call today, one message came out loud and clear: Google’s mobile strategy is starting to pay off. “Android adoption is about to explode,” declared CEO Eric Schmidt, explaining that all the “necessary conditions” are set for growth: There are now 12 Android phones out there (most recently the Motorola Cliq) across 32 carriers in 26 countries.

The whole Android strategy, of course, is to offer an low-cost, fully-featured, open-source OS and hand that to the cell phone manufacturers so that they can concentrate more on designing desirable hardware. And what does Google get out of all that? More mobile searches, which could be one of its biggest sources of growth in the coming years.

Facebook’s quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps, since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser.

Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web, it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more.

As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks “the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,” says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually.

But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia’s E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:

Do the prices people are willing to pay for a phone app depend on the device or the type of app? A comparison of July prices in the iPhone App Store and the Android Market by app analytics firm Distimo found that across broad categories such as entertainment, navigation, and tools the average price for the Top 100 paid apps was very similar for both mobile computing platforms.

There were a few exceptions. The average price for a paid reference app on Android is close to $9, which is more than twice the average price for the same category on the iPhone. This disparity is mostly due to some dictionary apps on Android priced between $15 and $30 (mostly from Paragon Software). I’m not sure those are big sellers, but it bumps up the average. Finance and social networking apps are also slightly more expensive on average.

Games are on average about the same as on the iPhone, around $2.50. But if you look at the price distribution, that tells you a different story. While most of the top paid games on the iPhone go for $0.99, on Android many more games are priced between $1.99 and $4.99.

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.

German mobile startup Cellity is getting acquired by Nokia. The sale price was not disclosed, but it is not likely to be more than $10 million to $20 million. About a year ago, Vodafone bought Cellity’s competitor Zyb for 31.5 million Euros.

Nokia didn’t actually buy the whole company, only “certain assets” and the team, which is usually code for a fire sale. Cellity had a Series A round of funding in 2007, led by Mangrove Capital Partners.

The print magazine business isn’t doing so hot right now, but Sports Illustrated might just have found a new business model: selling an iPhone app featuring models from its 2009 Swimsuit Issue. Although the Swimsuit issue came out in February, the app just hit the iTunes store today (iTunes link). Marketed as the “World’s Sexiest App” with a 17+ age rating, it costs $2.99. I’m sure it’s going to make a mint.

What do you get for $2.99? Photos of 20 models including Brooklyn Decker and Danica Patrick in various states of bikini nothingness and “breathtaking bodypainting videos.” There are also other “intimate” videos for each model. Does Playboy have an iPhone app? It might save them too.

Despite the early fanfare and limited inventory at launch, Sprint doesn’t seem to be hitting it out of the park with the new Palm Pre. Earlier this month we reported on some channel checks by JNK Securities analyst Mike Ehrlich, who called 50 Sprint stores and found out that sales were lackluster. Yesterday, he issued a new report based on channel checks from last Thursday and Friday, Week 5 after the Pre’s launch. Of the stores willing to discuss sales volumes, here is the breakdown of demand on a per-store basis:

Week 5 Palm Pre Sales Per Sprint Store
• 10 units or less: 30% (vs. 40% the prior week)
• 10 to 20 units: 45% (vs. 33% the prior week)
• 20 to 30 units: 18% (vs. 16% the prior week)
• 30 to 50 units: 12% (no comparable)

Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax network). NextWave acquired PacketVideo in 2005 and the company is now its main source of cash.

The investment indicates how important PacketVideo’s technology is to NTT Docomo, and raises the possibility of an outright purchase down the line. Other customers of PacketVideo include Verizon Wireless, Orange (in France), and T-Mobile. They might not feel so warm and fuzzy about PacketVideo now being so closely aligned with another carrier, even if it is in Japan.

Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.

Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).

On a mobile phone, the more you can automate search, the more likely people are to use it. Or at least that is the principle which seems to be guiding Geodelic Systems, a startup which is creating a “search-less search” experience for mobile phones. Today in a press release, it revealed that it raised $3.5 million in an earlier round possibly in 2008 from Clearstone Ventures (where it was incubated) and Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Rahul Sonnad, who previously founded thePlatform, a Web video publishing service he sold to Comcast in 2006.

Geodelic is creating a location-aware search engine for restaurants, movies, stores, flights, hotels, and local attractions which recommends results based on their distance from you. A “location carousel” brings up nearby results on a map by category and it learns from you behavior which places, stores, and brands you like the best, and will target you accordingly. The app is designed to be as passive as possible, eliminating or minimizing the amount of typing required. However, it doesn’t go as far as some augmented reality tagging apps such as Layar or Sekai Camera, which add a data layer on top of the view through a phone’s camera.

Now that the new iPhone 3G S has a video camera, TechStars startup Occipital has released an update to its RedLaser app (iTunes link, $1.99) which speeds up barcode scanning by not requiring you to first take a picture. Occipital claims that its “realtime barcode scanner” is the only one which works on phones with both autofocus (the new 3G S) and without (the older iPhone and iPod Touch). Other barcode scanning apps, such as ShopSavvy’s, can also take advantage of the autofocus camera on the 3G S, but can’t do on-the-fly scanning on the older models.

(Video after the jump).

iPhone game developer ngmoco is announcing today its own cross-promotion publishing network fro iPhone games. The publishing network, called Plus+, will be headed up by Simon Jeffery, the current president and COO of Sega of America. Prior to Sega, Jeffery was president of LucasArts. His new title at ngmoco will be chief publishing officer. This is a major hire for the iPhone game startup, whose CEO Neil Young is also a former star executive from the console gaming world (he came from Electronic Arts).

Ngmoco is already one of the top game developers on the iPhone. Its hits include Rolando, Mazefinger, Star Defense, Topple, and WordFu. Jeffery will be running a new business for ngmoco, Plus+ Publishing. The company already cross-promotes its own games. For instance, about 15 percent of Rolando sales come from cross-promotion, according to Young. With Plus+ Publishing, outside iPhone game developers will be able to apply to become part of this cross-promotion network also.

Ngmoco will offer to publish and market iPhone games under its own Plus brand, as well as simply cross-promote other games using its own popular games and the other games which become part of Plus+ (with different revenue splits depending on the level of service). Developers who want to apply can email gamemakers [at] ngmoco [dot] com.

As the phones in our pockets become our second computers, it will become increasingly important to sync data between the two. Not just emails, but contacts, calendars, photos, music, apps, browser bookmarks, files, and more. Nearly every Web phone out there comes with at least some sort of rudimentary syncing app. Apple has MobileMe, Nokia has Ovi, Palm has Synergy, Blackberry has Internet Services, and Microsoft has My Phone.

An open-source competitor to all of these is Funambol. The startup evaluated all of the syncing services and scored them based on criteria such as how many kinds of data each one supports, cost, usability, and number of supported devices. (Full study embedded at bottom of post). It came up with a score for each out of a maximum of 40. Naturally enough, Funambol scored the highest, but if you throw that out you end up with the list below (with accompanying scores).

Can you feel the tingling in the air? If you haven’t found it already,you will. This is going to be the summer of love. I am talking, of course, about smartphone love. The serenades have already begun for the June 6 launch of the Palm Pre. Next week, Apple will reveal it’s next iPhone (you know MG is going to get one). Blackberry might come out with its second Storm by summer’s end. And the lovefest will continue throughout the year with launch after launch of new Android phones as well. It will be practically nonstop. I hope you can handle it.

When you look at sales of the iPhone or Blackberry as a percentage of total cell phone sales, they are still a tiny smidgen of the one billion phones estimated to be sold this year. But when you look at what really matters—their share of revenues or operating profits—the picture looks a lot different. Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff calculated the share of operating profits going to each major mobile handset manufacturer and came up with the eye-opening chart above. It shows Apple (pink) and RIM (turquoise) increasingly taking a disproportionate share of industry profits, mostly at the expense of Nokia’s diminishing handset operating profits (blue).

Score another one for the iPhone. Yahoo is abandoning its mobile app for the Blackberry and other smartphones in order to focus more on its recently relaunched iPhone app. For every other phone, it is concentrating development efforts around the mobile browser experience. People applying for the smartphone app, which is still in beta, are receiving a notice (reproduced below) stating that “Yahoo has decided to cease development” of the app on May 20th. Yahoo Mobile now only has eyes for the iPhone. Rather than create a million apps for every other phone, it is standardizing on delivering the same experience through the mobile browser. Or so it would seem.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirms:

It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund, which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled backwards, you know).

The app was working, and could be released sometime this summer, according to my source. The photo above shows the app on a Blackberry Bold, and appears to be showing off its contact search functionality. You type in a few letters, and it returns the contact information for every match in your inbox (even people who you haven’t necessarily added to your address book yet). I wonder what else it can do.

As more mobile phones become full-fledged Web-browsing devices, a small but fast-growing segment of all visitors to any given Websites will be mobile. But with so many different mobile phones and browsers, it is difficult to figure out where most of that mobile traffic is coming from. A new mobile Website tracking service called PercentMobile lets you track mobile visitors by device, cell phone operator, country, and more. All you do is insert one line of pixel-based code into the header of your Website and it does the rest. All mobile browsers can read the pixel code, unlike the Javascript required by Google Analytics, for instance.

PercentMobile is in private beta, but we have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. Use the code freecoffee at signup.

Android is making steady gains in mobile ad market share, accounting for 6 percent of all mobile ad requests measured by AdMob in its latest March metrics. That puts it neck and neck with the Palm OS, compared to a 5 percent /7 percent share split in favor of Palm just one month before.. Windows Mobile Devices also saw a share decline from 13 percent to 11 percent, while Blackberry’s RIM OS gained a point to 22 percent, and the iPhone stayed the same at 50 percent.

AdMob measures ad requests from both mobile browsers and mobile apps, thus its numbers are a good proxy for mobile Web usage (minus paid apps which don’t serve ads, of course). On a device level, the Android G1 (HTC Dream) actually overtook the Palm Centro, becoming the No. 4 smartphone in terms of Web usage in the U.S. (after the iPhone, the Blackberry 8300, and Blackberry 8100).

Want to learn how to create an iPhone app? Later this week, aspiring app creators will be able to start watching a popular Stanford computer science course on developing iPhone apps right on their iPhones. Stanford will start distributing the course for free as a video podcast throughiTunes U. (The podcasts can also be watched on iPods and computers, obviously).

With more than 25,000 apps out there, which have been downloaded more than 800 million times, the competition is fierce for making the best apps. Apple itself provides a wealth of information for developers about its SDK, but for those who need a little more guidance or a refresher in the basics, watching these videos is like continuing education. The videos are not on iTunes yet, but the first one should appear within the next few days.

Why pay to go to Stanford when you can get the lecture on iTunes for free?

The iPhone now accounts for 50 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones in the U.S., according to an AdMob Mobile Metrics report released this morning. Over the past six months, the iPhone has taken share from Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In August 2008, the iPhone made up only 10 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones. During the same time, Blackberry’s share has gone from 32 percent to 21 percent (with the Curve and the Pearl coming in stronger than the Storm), while Windows Mobile has taken an even bigger hit, declining from 30 percent to 13 percent. Palm is also down to 7 percent from 19 percent six months ago.

The only other smartphone operating system that is showing gains in mobile Web usage is Android, which has captured a strong 5 percent share just three months after launch. And that is up from 3 percent in January. The gains shown by the iPhone and Android show what is possible when phones are built with fully capable browsers and support a rich array of Web apps.

On a worldwide basis, smartphones running on the Symbian OS (mostly from Nokia) still dominate mobile Web traffic with a 43 percent share. But that is down from 64 percent in August. The iPhone has gone from 4 percent to 33 percent of mobile Web traffic on a worldwide basis. All the other mobile operating systems are down as well.

The mobile version of the Firefox browser, Fennec, is now officially in beta. It works only on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, but developers can also download it onto their computers. The Fennec browser is designed to make maximum use of the limited screen space available on mobile phones and tries to do everything possible to minimize typing.

It incorporates the Firefox “awesome bar,” which acts as both navigation and search bar. Start typing in a URL or search term and it auto-suggests web pages based on your past Web surfing habits. Various searches, including Google, YAhoo Answers, and Wikipedia, are one click away via links at the bottom. The browser also remembers all your passwords, just like Firefox. It supports Flash. And add-ons can be created for the mobile browser.

The user interface takes some zooming and panning concepts which were previously previewed by Mozilla Labs. Each Web page expands to fill the entire screen, but moving the page to the side reveals different controls, including bookmarks, back and forward buttons, tabs, and different tools.

With more than 20,000 apps available for the iPhone, standing out from the crowd is becoming harder and harder for app developers. There are only so many slots in the the top apps lists in the iTunes Store. Discovering new apps is becoming a real problem. But what if apps started cross-promoting other apps, just like they do on Facebook?

AdMob, which claims to be the largest mobile ad network on the iPhone covering more than 1,000 apps, will be launching an iPhone App Exchange by the end of this month for any developer who is already part of its ad network. AdMob currently shows ads across 7.2 million iPhones. Developers will be able to volunteer a portion of the ad inventory on their apps to go towards promoting other apps. In return, their apps will be promoted on other apps in the network. Depending on whether monetization or distribution is more important to them, they will be able to adjust the settings on their AdMob account accordingly.

Mobile Web usage is still a nascent activity, but comScore put out some data on the information-consumption habits of consumers in the U.S. The number of people who access news and information daily on their mobile phones doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009.

The second most popular mobile activity was social networking, with 9.3 million daily mobile users (although for some reason this number also includes blog access). While social networking is only half as popular as reading news, it is growing four times as fast, up from 1.8 million users a year ago.