But even more interesting, perhaps, is what is happening to the next tier of players. Both HTC and Motorola, for example, have recently issued downbeat earnings and forecasts.

Not so long ago, it appeared that the rising tide would lift all smartphone boats. HTC, in particular, was doubling sales year over year, and its growth seemed unstoppable.

But now it appears that the wave is thrashing as many as it is helping. HTC has hit a wall; plenty of other Android players, including Sony and Motorola, are struggling to keep pace with the leaders.

Both Motorola and HTC have said their strategy this year will be about putting more effort behind fewer devices. It remains to be seen what the plan is for Sony, which is in the process of taking over its cellphone joint venture with Ericsson.

As for the top of the heap, both Apple and Samsung appear to be flourishing. For the year, Samsung edged Apple in smartphone shipments, while Apple was narrowly ahead of Samsung in the fourth quarter.

The new release will support the iPhone, iPad and Android devices, as well as BlackBerry and Microsoft’s own Windows Phone operating system.

“In today’s hyperconnected world, customers need to be able to access their business-critical data on the device of their choice from wherever they are,” Dynamics CRM General Manager Dennis Michalis said in a statement.

The release continues a Microsoft trend of developing mobile apps for the competition’s platforms. In December alone, Redmond added iOS support for Kinectimals, SkyDrive and Lync, along with an iPad version of OneNote.

Of course, the big question is whether Microsoft will bring full-blown Office to iOS.

For the fourth quarter, HTC said it earned 10.94 billion Taiwanese dollars ($369 million), or 13.06 Taiwan dollars per share (44 cents U.S.), on revenue of 101.42 billion Taiwan dollars ($3.42 billion).

That’s a revenue drop of more than 2 percent from a year earlier, for a company that until recently had been seeing sales doubling those of prior periods.

HTC had already warned of the sales drop when it released unaudited results last month. However, its outlook for the current quarter offered a further disappointment.

The company forecast that, for the current quarter, sales will drop to between 65 billion and 70 billion Taiwanese dollars, with gross margins falling to 25 percent from last quarter’s 27 percent. HTC said it expects the dip in margins to be temporary.

“While short term performance may not meet the results as expected, we have gained further experience and advancement in the areas of brand management and product innovation,” CEO Peter Chou said in a statement. “These fundamental strengths and the groundwork we have laid will take us into 2012 with a renewed focus and determination.”

HTC was on a roll for much of 2010 and 2011, rapidly growing sales amid the surge in Android demand.

In Monday’s earnings release, the company reiterated its plans to focus on fewer new devices this year, a strategy similarly being undertaken by also-struggling Motorola.

And for those who are into both football and geekery, tomorrow is kind of like the Super Bowl. Well, technically speaking, I guess tomorrow is like the Super Bowl for everyone.

Anyhoo. For everyone looking for some tech to go with their gridiron, there are lots of options.

First of all, NBC is streaming the Super Bowl live over the Internet, for those who can’t make it to a television or want a second screen to enjoy even more of the action.

ESPN president John Skipper said at D: Dive Into Media that he thinks giving away the game for free is a bad idea, but NBC paid for the rights, so they get to do what ever they want.

Verizon is also broadcasting the game live to the smallest of screens via its NFL Mobile service. (However, Peter Kafka notes their marketing of said service could use some work.)

Second, there are a ton of Super Bowl apps, including the official ones for both iPhone and Android, as well as a game program. Peanuts are still not downloadable, but content-tagging app Shazam is offering a variety of commercial tie-ins. Check here for even more game-day apps.

And of course, the big game will be the talk of Twitter, to be sure.

Lastly, as a special treat, AllThingsD will be offering live coverage of the game, the commercials and the social-media hoopla. We had so much fun in January with Footballmer, our liveblog mash-up of Steve Ballmer’s final CES keynote and the BCS championship, that we decided to do it again.

This time, though, I’ll actually get to watch the game, rather than having Ballmer duty. I’ll be commenting on the game, the commercials, the tech and the Twitter commentary. Check back tomorrow before kickoff for that.

In the two months since Path 2 launched, it has attracted a million new users, according to Path CEO Dave Morin. That’s roughly the same amount Path got in its entire first year.

(Path still has a long way to go; Morin’s former employer, Facebook, announced this week that it has 845 million users, and the social juggernaut has in the past year added “close friends” lists and better sharing and filtering tools.)

Beyond the two-million user milestone, Morin shared a bunch more stats and info about Path’s progress to date.

On the engagement front, he said 70 percent of people who use Path in a week return the next week.

Path users have created over 50 million items of content and half a billion pieces of feedback. The latter is a somewhat inflated stat, because “feedback” is created every time a user looks at content on Path. But for reference, there are 15 million pieces of feedback created on Path per day now, versus 10 million total in the first year, Morin said.

The most common types of content shared on Path are photos, “thoughts” (status messages) and sleep records (users can manually note when they power down for the night and when they wake up in the morning), in that order.

There’s one song posted on Path per second, and the most popular artist is Drake.

Am I getting too “in the weeds” here? How about some geographic data: The U.S. is by far Path’s biggest country, but other fast-growing contributors include the U.K., Germany, Japan, France and Korea.

San Francisco-based Path had 15 employees when Path 2 launched; now it’s up to 25.

What’s next for the company?

Well, it launched tilt-shift photo and video filters this week. Next up are extended platform tools (Path already has a deal to get health data from Nike), smarter friend-request filtering, and perhaps a Windows Phone app, Morin said.

So, perhaps the obvious next question — given Path raised Series A funding a year ago — is when will Path hit investors up for more money?

That answer was more inexact. “Sometime,” Morin said.

(Photo description credit: Dave Morin accepts the 2012 Crunchie award for best design from Google’s Marissa Mayer; (cc) Kenneth Yeung — www.snapfoc.us on Flickr)

RIM developer executive Alec Saunders mentioned the program in a Twitter message on Thursday, with the company offering up a few more details on its Web site.

The offer doesn’t give developers much time, requiring Android apps to be optimized for the PlayBook and submitted for listing in the BlackBerry World store by Feb. 13 in order to get a free tablet.

RIM has an app-playing engine that allows programs designed for Android to run on its QNX-based PlayBook.

The company also has a glut of the tablets, and has been running various promotions designed to reduce inventory and boost the number of tablets in use.

“Further details about the promotion will be posted on our developer site as soon as possible, but the plan is to provide one free 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook to every registered BlackBerry App World vendor who converts their Android app for use on the BlackBerry PlayBook,” RIM said on its Web site.

While Google doesn’t require the kinds of approvals needed from Apple or Microsoft before an app goes live, the company has been taking some actions to try to keep malicious code out of its virtual storefront.

Bouncer not only looks for known malware and spyware, it also tries to detect behavior that might offer a red flag that a product is malicious. In addition, the company runs every submitted app on its own cloud infrastructure to simulate how the program would run on an Android device. Finally, when the company learns of a new type of exploit, it goes back and rescans all of the apps in the market.

“We have been working on this for a while,” Android Engineering VP Hiroshi Lockheimer said in an interview. “It’s always been a goal of ours to have a secure market.”

Lockheimer said that avoiding a manual approval process is very important to Google, but he said that shouldn’t have to mean giving up security. Bouncer, he said, is Google’s attempt to avoid that trade-off.

“It is the Google way to use technology and automation,” he said.

And, Lockheimer said, it is paying off. While lots of outsiders have said Android malware is on the rise, Google says it has seen a decline in malicious apps in the official Android market. The number of such programs was down 40 percent from the first half of 2011 to the second half of the year, Lockheimer said.

Last week, I talked to Punit Soni, who runs games and mobile for Google+, to get an update on Google’s plan for social games. Since the conversation took place before Facebook’s filing, Soni has no direct responses to the numbers.

But he addresses in general how Google expects to challenge Facebook’s dominance in social gaming, and the big opportunity in front of them to do something different.

“There’s no point in being in this game if we are a ‘me-too,’” he said. “We want to be different.”

Yesterday, in Facebook’s IPO filing we learned that substantially all of the company’s payments revenue is coming from virtual goods from inside social games, and that one game publisher alone — Zynga — is contributing 12 percent of the company’s revenue, payments and advertising included.

At those rates, it’s easy to see why Google is emphasizing games and wooing developers to its platform.

It started off with a bang in August, when it launched games. In talking to reporters, Soni announced the company was sharing 95 percent of the revenue from virtual goods with developers, and was keeping only 5 percent for itself.

That was, and remains, much more generous than the 30 percent cut that Facebook takes.

Still, with only 36 games on its network, and far fewer users (however you want to calculate it), Soni was pretty honest about how far they still have to go. He was also extremely enthusiastic, and at times looked as if he wanted to leap out of his chair to get going on some of the projects Google had planned.

First, and foremost, he said they are working hard to get virality right; and second, they want to nail cross-platform, so that games worked seamlessly across the Web and mobile.

Viral channels are the most common way for people to learn about a game, and also one of the most controversial.

More than a year ago, Facebook was forced to dial back those channels, because users complained about receiving too many unwanted messages.

“We err on the side of caution,” Soni said. “We are slowly giving more options to do things.”

Soni said they also see a big opportunity to differentiate by offering a multiplatform approach, and letting developers build games that work across Google+, Google’s Chrome Web Store and mobile. Of course, it has an advantage because of the millions of Android users, whereas Facebook’s mobile efforts are still nascent.

Already, there are some examples of cross-platform play.

Today, you can play Rovio’s Angry Birds and Bubble Witch Saga across both Google+ and the Chrome App Store, and can pick up where you left off between the two.

“These are not Google+ games, but games that are on Google,” Soni stressed. “A lot more is coming on mobile.”

Google has also focused on getting a number of games as exclusives that launch a few weeks on Google+ before they show up on Facebook. To date, it has scored at least three titles — including a major title, Kabam’s Godfather — and there are more coming.

Asked why the game developers are willing to go exclusively on Google+, Soni said there’s some marketing that Google is willing to put toward it, but otherwise, “they are betting on us.”

He says it’s mostly the potential of the platform, and the fact that he’s receptive to feedback, that helps him understand exactly what developers need. Developers also acknowledge that supporting more platforms is helpful in reaching more players and diversifying their risk.

“If they say it’s because the platform is the best ever — no, it’s not true. But the plans we have and the sensitivity that we have for our users and developers, we will be very good sometime soon. … That’s why you are seeing exclusives.”

Soni wasn’t wiling to spill specific plans about what was launching next, but said a lot more is coming.

“We are a start-up platform. We are humble and know our flaws. As we grow, you’ll see new things. My work has barely started,” he said.

The Optik, for Sprint, will sell for $99 with a two-year contract, or $349 without a contract. It runs the Honeycomb version of Android, packs a dual-core Qualcomm chip, front and rear cameras and a 7-inch screen.

ZTE has laid out some ambitious goals, both globally and in North America. The company says it wants to become a player in hotspots, phones and tablets here.

“That’s our strategy this year,” ZTE USA chief Lixin Cheng told AllThingsD last month.

In a statement on Thursday, Cheng said that the Optik should make tablets available to a new range of customers.

Whether it can do that, or will instead just become one of many low-cost Android tablets, remains to be seen.

Facebook, it would appear, agrees.

In Wednesday’s filing to go public, the social networking giant mentions several times that more than 425 million users access the service each month from a mobile device. However, it also notes that the company currently makes little ad revenue from all these mobile visits and that it expects a continued shift to mobile devices.

“We believe that mobile usage of Facebook is critical to maintaining user growth and engagement over the long term, and we are actively seeking to grow mobile usage, although such usage does not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue,” the company states in one part of the document.

The challenges in mobile feature prominently in the “risk factors” section of the company’s S-1 filing. In other sections of the document, mobile is also listed as both a key growth opportunity and an investment area for the company.

By my browser’s count, the word mobile appears 123 times in the document.

To date, much of Facebook’s work has centered around bringing its applications to all manner of smartphones and feature phones, but the company has said it wants to be a more serious player in mobile and last year released the first part of an HTML5-based platform it hopes developers will take advantage of.

In addition, as reported by AllThingsD in a series of articles last year, Facebook is quietly developing its own mobile phone design as part of a project code-named Buffy.

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK IPO:

• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

But fortunately, there are a few free tax apps that can help you with that paperwork.*

Before you get started, you might want to use a tax calculator to estimate how much you’ll get in returns … or how much you’ll owe. The TurboTax TaxCaster is scientifically unproven to either make you shout aloud with joy in the middle of the office or cause your stomach to drop faster than if you were riding this. The TaxCaster app is free on iOS and Android mobile devices as well as online.

TurboTax's iPad app

For preparing your tax paperwork, there’s now a TurboTax iPad app. Intuit actually launched the app last March, but it was too late in the season to really gain traction. The iPad app works even when you’re offline, so you can prepare your tax paperwork from almost anywhere.

This year, TurboTax, which says more than 70 percent of its customers now file online, has added some new features to the iPad app. First, it has hired 700 CPAs and tax attorneys nationwide to be on call for questions that app users might have.

Also, filers can now import data and forms from about 400,000 employers and financial institutions.

Lastly, the app’s keypad has a new user-friendly design. The large, optimized keypad is a good idea. Even when your eyes start to glaze over, you can’t miss the keys.

As with the rest of TurboTax’s mobile apps, it won’t cost users anything to download the iPad app and punch in their information, but users will be charged through iTunes when they go to actually e-file through TurboTax. At the low end, TurboTax Deluxe costs $29.99.

H&R Block has introduced a new mobile app for iPhone and Android devices that allows filers to complete a federal 1040EZ form and state return by snapping a photo of their W-2 forms (TurboTax’s SnapTax does this as well.) The service is free through February 29th.

Filers with more complex tax returns can use the H&R Block iPad app to complete those additional forms.

H&R Block’s smartphone app also aims to help users locate a nearby H&R Block office, estimate a tax refund, check the status on a refund, and decipher various tax terms with a glossary.

Like TurboTax, H&R Block is now offering free extended support for taxpayers, through a Tax Answers program. And if you’d rather have your tax returns filed for you through video conferencing, H&R does that, too, through its new Block Live service.

Keep in mind that if your gross adjusted income last year was $57,000 or less, you can qualify for free e-filing through the IRS’s Web site. And as Ina Fried pointed out a year ago at this time, the IRS has a mobile app for iPhone and Android phones that lets users track their refund status.

*This is the sentence in which I feign enthusiasm over tax season.

But for those more interested in the postgame highlights and analysis, the inaugural Super Bowl XLVI app from NFL Magazine might do the trick.

The tablet app is meant to be more commemorative than anything else — think of those dust-gathering magazines you collect each year — and it won’t stream the game live.

The app will offer image-rich season recaps for both teams, player highlight reels, polls and Super Bowl history. (No word on whether it includes a slide show of Tom Brady’s hairstyles throughout the years.)

After the game, the app will be updated with 15 to 20 minutes of highlight clips, breakdowns of key plays, interviews with players, NFL.com articles on the game and 360-degree photos.

The video available on the app during and after the game will be “clean” game highlights from NFL Network. Later on, extended highlights from NFL Films, with NBC logos and graphics, will be made available through the app.

The app, which is available on the iPad and on Android tablets, is selling at a pregame discount of $2.99 — which is less than half of the postgame price.

“We’ve seen a lot of fan demand for this,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of NFL Digital Media. “We plan to keep the app fresh for several weeks as we introduce new content, and ultimately provide a kind of lifetime digital keepsake.”

Nielsen data shows that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV, while a poll conducted by Velti and Harris Interactive shows that nearly 60 percent of mobile users plan to look at or use their mobile device during the game. We’ll likely see some interesting data after Sunday, as well, about mobile usage during the Super Bowl. These metrics are key for advertisers as they try to gauge how many eyeballs are on second — and third, and fourth — screens during big television events.

And what about those Super Bowl ads, you ask? NFL Magazine’s Super Bowl app won’t feature any third-party ads this year, but it will include NFL promotions, as well as ads for The Daily, the tablet newspaper owned by News Corp. (which also owns this site), since the NFL is using The Daily’s technology platform to power the app.

Berman said that since this is the first time NFL Digital has done a commemorative Super Bowl app — it’s the NFL’s first tablet-only app, as well — they’re not focused on signing up a bunch of ad partners to start, though it’s a possibility for future versions of the app.

Revenue generation aside, the app means something else for rabid sports fans: The ability to call up key plays on your tablet whenever you feel like watching them. And rewatching them. And showing them to your friends. And discussing the nuances of the plays.

And unlike a commemorative magazine — which, by the way, the NFL will be producing, as well — the app provides an interactive and updatable experience. Look, Ma, moving pictures!

Seattle-based Treemo Labs has created an iOS app maker called Appafolio that requires no code in the app-building process, will show up to 10 screens of data or imagery, and caches the app content so the app will work even when an Internet connection isn’t available.

The company wants to become an app resource for business users and marketing professionals who want to create brochure-like apps that likely won’t pass muster in the App Store. Appafolio is free, though there will be a premium model that offers more bells and whistles.

There’s also a simple Appafolio pass phrase that app makers can use as a URL and share with anybody, directing iPhone and iPad users directly to their app instead of to an app store or marketplace. The link won’t, however, work on a Web browser.

Treemo co-founder and CEO Brent Brookler pointed to camera company Contour as an example. Contour used Appafolio to show off its new line of cameras a few weeks ago at the Consumer Electronics Show — where the cellular service and Wi-Fi connectivity is notoriously bad. The company used an iPad as a kind of marketing brochure at its booth, and since the content of the app could be downloaded and cached in advance, there were no issues swiping through the Contour app and viewing all of the data available.

Of course, the number of companies that help people make apps is as large as the day is long — and some them also offer no-code builds. There’s also AppMkr, AppIncubator, AppWhirl from App.co, AppVoyage and EachScape, which just nabbed $3 million in Series A funding, to name just a handful.

While the Appafolio product is geared toward business clients, the app maker doesn’t allow users to import things like PDF or PowerPoint files. So, for an offline deck, the non-iPad-owning business user might still turn to other software applications to create slides or brochures.

And while Brookler sees getting an Android app going as an important step to market Appafolio to the masses, for now the app is iOS-only.

Brookler says the app isn’t just for business users; a casual user might want to create an app for a wedding, for example. But that sort of app is also unlikely to pass App Store muster, so Appafolio makes it easier for those users to become developers for a day.

Seattle-based Treemo Labs launched in 2005 and has mainly created apps for media properties, including CBS News, “60 Minutes” and “Survivor,” as well as music video apps.

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

Which is good, because here’s another one: BuzzFeed, the online publishing start-up that’s the toast of people who like to write about online publishing start-ups, is adding a tech section run by Gizmodo star Matt Buchanan.

This follows a now-familiar pattern we’ve seen from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Last month, Peretti brought on Politico star Ben Smith to start up the site’s political coverage and to run its overall editorial operations. A couple of weeks ago, he hired Doree Shafrir from Rolling Stone’s Web site to oversee “culture” coverage for the site.

Now Buchanan*, a five-year veteran of Gawker Media’s gadget-obsessed site, will start a new “vertical,” along with John Herrman from Popular Mechanics.

All of this hiring comes as Peretti is flush with cash courtesy of a $15 million funding round, and has reconnected with many of the people he used to work with at Huffington Post, which he co-founded.

Fellow HuffPo cofounder Ken Lerer is also a BuzzFeed co-founder, and former HuffPo ad boss Greg Coleman has come on as an advisor. Everyone who types about the media business likes writing about Peretti, but if you haven’t read any of this yet, I’d suggest starting with this New York Observer profile.

Buchanan and his crew will start publishing in mid-February, says Smith, who says the coverage will be something like what Buchanan did at Gizmodo, and also nothing like it. Think more “tech culture,” and less “stuff about gadgets.”

Well, maybe you should hold off on calling it “tech culture,” too, Smith says. “I guess I hesitate to call it tech culture, because I don’t think there’s a clear line between tech and culture anymore.”

Okay. So what’s next up in the BuzzFeed expansion plan? There’s got to be a bunch of cash left, right? “There will be more. Stay tuned.”

And now, a lightly edited version of a superfast exit interview I conducted via IM with Buchanan, who I gather is headed out for a couple of drinks as I type this.

Peter Kafka: Why’d you leave Gawker Media? I know lots of people have come to you in the past. Why go now?

Matt Buchanan: It’s an opportunity to build something completely new on a really exciting platform, which, even though the hallmark of Gizmodo is the immense freedom we all have, you know, the one thing I can never get here is the chance to do it all from scratch. And to do something that’s different from what a lot other tech sites are doing, I hope. I do love Gawker, and everybody here. I was from the generation that never got screwed over, so I only have good things to say about it.

Kafka: So should we be looking elsewhere for unboxing coverage, liveblogs of Android OS unveilings, and other blow-by-blow standards of tech coverage? Or will you leave all that behind?

Buchanan: Leaving almost all of that behind. I think technology deserves writing and criticism at the same level as any other aspect of culture, like film or music, because the reality of our world now is that it is just as important as those things. It is mainstream culture now. So we want to do tech for humans, as a main thing — but I also want hardcore tech readers to like what they see, too.

Like, we’ll talk about phones and gadgets to the extent that we find it interesting, and that other people might find it interesting, but no, this isn’t another gadget site. I would like to note that it is the first technology site powered entirely by ginger tears, which is what I’m most excited about.

Kafka: Curious about your take on your new employer. Seems to me that, while they’re uncomfortable saying this out loud, Jonah and crew are really setting out to build a new version of HuffPo: Build site by aggregating/curating, etc., other people’s content, then use that momentum/money to hire their own folks to build on that. The big obvious difference is that there isn’t a personality driving it from the get-go. And it’s tuned more to social than to search. Thoughts?

Buchanan: Yes! I think it’s too early to tell for some of that — even for me — but what I’m into is the fact that it’ll give John and I the freedom and flexibility to do the kind of tech writing and journalism that we want to do.

*Disclosure: I’ve met Matt a couple times, have chatted with him online a few more times, and I like him. He’s also an excellent resource if you’re planning a trip to Momofuku Ssäm (which you should definitely do, unless you’re a vegetarian) and need help with your ordering strategy.

The piece elicited a variety of reactions — even Roger Ebert seems to think it might be too late to learn a new keyboard. I also received a fair number of follow-up emails pointing out some interesting technologies that I’d missed.

So here are some other options for the touchscreen-averse:

Talk Emo to Me

A company called Siine is trying make touchscreen typing even quicker by replacing words or entire phrases with emoticons.

The Siine Writer app is based on editable icons. Each icon, or “Siine,” is supposed to convey three different words or phrases, depending on how many times the user taps it.

So, instead of typing out a text-laden message, users tap a series of visual cues that send the message to the person on the receiving end.

Users make the Siines by downloading the app from the Android market, going to the emoticon screen, holding down an emoticon and selecting “create,” to assign a new picture, a name and the corresponding text for the emoticon. After that, the Siine emoticon will appear on the user’s keyboard.

It’s a pretty nifty idea, though there would likely still be a need to enter text for more random words, and words used less frequently.

Siine is based in London and Barcelona; the company launched in 2007, and received funding last February from Atomico, the VC firm of Niklas Zennstrom, best known for co-founding Skype.

The free app is available in both English and Spanish for devices running Android OS. There’s also a tablet version of the app, available exclusively from Samsung Apps; at the moment, there isn’t a Siine app available for iPhone or iPad.

The Next Productivity Killer at Work

Here’s a familiar sequence of events: You’re typing away at your desk, and your phone pings — loudly — alerting you and the rest of the office to the fact that you’ve got a message. You’re in the middle of doing work, so you ignore it. But you don’t, really: You glance at your phone’s interface, quickly, just to check. But, wait — it’s your friend, asking if you want in on tickets that are going to sell out in exactly 47 seconds. Or it’s your significant other, asking if you could meet the handyman at the apartment. Or it’s your mom. You simply have to respond.

What if you could just keep typing on your desktop keyboard — and still respond to your urgent calls?

That’s the kind of keyboard Matias has come up with.

The Canada-based company uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly connect your phone to your keyboard and toggle between your desktop screen and phone — you’re still typing on your keyboard, but the text is appearing on the screen of your smartphone. (Here’s a video from CES that shows how this works, courtesy of Engadget.)

There are three Matias models — the $79 Slim One Keyboard, the $99 One Keyboard and the $199 Tactile One Keyboard — and all of them work on both PCs and Macs. The One and the Slim One are available now; the Tactile One will begin shipping in May.

The cheapest model, the Slim One, does not include a hub for your phone. The $99 One Keyboard includes a USB 2.0 hub and in-keyboard stand to hold your phone. The $199 Tactile One Keyboard has all of that, plus Alps mechanical key switches, which means there are real switches under each key.

And for those of you who wrote to me and suggested the Dvorak style of keyboard as an alternative to the traditional keyboard layout — Matias also makes a Dvorak keyboard for PCs and Mac computers.

Projecting Into the Future

We’ve seen at least one example of a laser-projection device that can create a keyboard out of any opaque surface. But what if you could make a keyboard out of any surface? What if you could make a keyboard … out of thin air?

MicroVision, a company specializing in laser-display technology, announced earlier this month the availability of its new laser-display engine, the PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display (the company’s patented display, PicoP, is actually the tech behind OmniTouch, mentioned in the previous article.)

The Gen 2 display takes it a step further: MicroVision’s PicoP Gen 2 can turn any projected image into a virtual touchscreen, regardless of the surface it’s being projected onto — or whether there’s even any surface at all. The PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display engine boasts 720p HD image projection and interactive displays up to 200 inches diagonal. MicroVision also announced technology for 3-D projectors, which could project 3-D images from a small display device.

While this kind of technology might have a more obvious place in the gaming market, it can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices to allow users to “step away from the screen.”

The company is emphasizing that this is still a prototype; MicroVision expects to begin sending samples to selected manufacturers for testing sometime early this year.

(There aren’t any images of this technology being deployed, so you’ll just have to imagine that keyboard in thin air for now.)

Forget the Keyboard — It’s All About Voice

Still other readers threw the four-letter word at me. Not that one. They were talking about Siri — and her competitors — saying they believe that touchscreen technologies, tactile or otherwise, are all moot because of the emergence of voice-command technology. Voice recognition is now in smartphones, gaming consoles and “smart” TV sets; is it only a matter of time before we’re dictating everything to our computer screens?

And this is the company that Google has decided to spend $12.5 billion on.

Of course, Motorola Mobility has always known it had its work cut out for it on the tablet front. As Christy Wyatt, VP and general manager for mobile devices, told AllThingsD’s Ina Fried last month, “I think tablets have come a long, long way. Adoption of Android tablets in the broad consumer sense, and especially with enterprise users, is still something we would like to focus on for the next year. A lot of that has to do with the application ecosystem, making sure we have the applications that we need. [Google's] Ice Cream Sandwich [Android update] goes a long way to unify the developer communities across screens.”

And why will people pick Motorola out of the legion of Android contenders? “At the end of the day, there are certain brands that consumers trust,” said Wyatt. “People tend to go to the Motorola brand where they are looking for a brand that they trust for reliability, for quality.”

The company’s results on Thursday showed that Nokia had better hurry.

Although it managed to ship one million of its Windows Phones last year, the company notes that its Symbian business is declining faster than it had predicted.

“Specifically, changing market conditions are putting increased pressure on Symbian,” CEO Stephen Elop noted in comments accompanying Nokia’s earnings release. “In certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian’s traditional strengths.”

In other words, expect low-cost Android to be a strong competitor across the globe. Elop had held out hope that cheap Android phones would prove to be underpowered and less popular.

“Just because there is a version of an operating system at a price point doesn’t mean that it is a great experience,” he said in an interview last year.

But that experience appears to be plenty good enough for a bunch of the customers that Nokia had hoped would continue to buy Symbian devices.

When it announced its plans to move to Windows Phone a year ago, Nokia had said it expected nonetheless to sell a further 150 million devices.

“As a result of the changing market conditions, combined with our increased focus on Lumia, we now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated,” Elop said.

The company didn’t provide a new estimate, but did say that it took a charge last quarter for excess inventory and purchase commitments that it had made. It also declined to make an overall financial forecast for 2012, in part because of the uncertainty over future Symbian sales.

AT&T says it was particularly happy with smartphone sales, and says it had a record quarter for both Apple and Android handsets.

It said it activated 7.6 million iPhones during Q4, the majority of which were iPhone 4S models, which didn’t go on sale until two weeks into the quarter.

That means AT&T, which once had the worldwide exclusive on iPhones, now accounted for 20 percent of Apple’s quarterly handset sales. The majority of those went to existing customers who re-upped their contracts when they got new machines: AT&T added a total of 2.5 million wireless subs.