Ever since Apple CEO Steve Jobs sparked a firestorm with Adobe over the relevance of Adobe’s Flash technology for interactive mobile media, a stepped-up PR campaign looked like Adobe’s only ammunition. On Thursday, Adobe got its first chance to fling back a tangible response with the beta release of its Flash Player for select Android …

Google kept us busy with announcements at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco, like news of a Chrome Web Store, Google TV, a forthcoming update to the Android operating system that includes the first full-fledged Flash Player for a mobile phone, changes to the camera app, and support for tethering and portable hot spots, among a list of other …

A white plastic “cube”* that is slightly bigger than a thumb tip protrudes from the top of an Android phone. A thin slit runs through it; peek inside and you can make out the interior metal nub capable of reading any credit card that swoops through it. This is Square, an accessory to the recently released Android version of an …

If you’ve been following the development of Mozilla’s Firefox browser for Android phones, you might be interested to know that Mozilla has just begun releasing nightly updates of Firefox Mobile (code-name Fennec) for Android. The nightly builds still reflect the early-days pre-alpha version of Fennec like the one we test-drove in April. Needless to say, these builds are targeting dedicated …

For the next two days, Google geekdom will gather at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, bringing with them an opportunity for publishers to spread their products’ influence by getting developers on board–and maybe line their own corporate pockets in the process. Take PayPal, for instance. At the conference opening on Wednesday, the online payment giant announced a …

Any urbanite knows that directions aren’t created equally. Pedestrians can usually go wherever their feet can take them, but road traffic has to contend with hated one-way streets. Don’t even get us started on cyclists. Luckily for bike riders toting Android phones in their messenger bags, a few days after Google added directions specifically for cyclists, the Maps team rolled …

It’s been about a month since Twitter began contributing its official apps to the BlackBerry marketplace, rather than sitting back and letting third-party developers take the reins. We checked out Twitter’s new, free, official in-house Android app over the weekend and for the most part, we’ve been liking what we see. While there’s no shortage of third-party Twitter apps in …

Article updated 5/3/2010 at 1:28 pm with new details about operating system compatibility. About a year and a half after releasing a mobile version of its personal-finance service for the iPhone, Mint.com is bringing its free credit-card and budget tracker to Android phones. As with the iPhone app, passcode-protected Mint.com on Android has you monitoring credit card, bank, and investment …

Native Flash support for Android phones may be only a month away, but in the meantime, mobile browser-maker Skyfire presents a workaround in its brand-new beta app for Android phones. Skyfire 2.0 beta for Android looks and acts like your typical souped-up WebKit browser for Android phones, with the exception of a tool that lets you stream Flash video–and soon …

Now that the dust has settled on Opera Mini for iPhone’s dramatic entry into the App Store and subsequent million-download day, the browser company has gotten to work addressing some user complaints in Thursday’s Opera Mini for iPhone update. The fixes, however, are subtle. The most significant one rights a network issue that caused Opera Mini to freeze at start-up. …