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It's about to be put up or shut up time for Microsoft in mobile. On October 11, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega will be conducting a New York City press conference to spill the beans on the widely anticipated Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

Microsoft has been rather immobile in the smartphone biz these past few years. The company's handsets have been overshadowed by Apple's iPhone, Google's Android devices, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry. Recent efforts by the company to turn things around in mobile have proved disastrous--witness the summer demise, after less than two months in the market, of the company's youth-oriented Kin handsets.

The detail comes in a fawning article about the open-source OS from Newsweek, covering how Android was developed by one man with a vision (Andy Rubin) who now has "virtually unlimited resources" to make it great. But the interesting part of the piece is Eric Schmidt's assertion that despite giving the OS away, Google still turns a profit on it.

he premise is that Android makes it easier for mobile users to get onto the internet, and that every internet user generates advertising revenue for Google. The corporation reasons, therefore, that if there were no Androids, there would be fewer people online and thus less revenue for Google...

We guessed the latest batch of Facebook phone rumors from this morning wouldn’t be the last we’d hear about the supposed INQ mobile/Facebook collaboration, and on cue a new set of tidbits have arrived.  GigaOm have been piecing together their own sources and have fleshed things out a little: they say Bloomberg’s H1 2011 timescale is over-confident but that the first network to see the Facebook phone will be Hutchinson’s 3, likely with a Spotify bundle in tow.  While they reiterate that the vaunted AT&T deal hasn’t been finalized yet, they also say that, if Spotify manage their predicted December US launch, access could also be bundled on the AT&T version of the smartphone(s)....

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This Article is written by Christina Warren
Gartner has released a report predicting that by 2014, Android will be second only to Symbian in mobile operating system marketshare worldwide, with the two platforms accounting for nearly 60% of the mobile OS market within the next four years. The news follows numerous recent bullish reports on the state of Android in the U.S.

We don’t see many devices running on Nokia’s Symbian platform in the U.S., save a few feature phones here and there. In the rest of the world, however, Symbian remains the dominant mobile OS, in part because it is open source and can be used on devices at various price points....

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 This Article is eritten by Brenna Ehrlich