The internet buzzed late this week after leaked screenshots were published hinting at some enhancements to the current Gmail desktop application and Android app. Photos posted by The Next Web and picked up by others show a more tabbed interface on the desktop similar to other updated Google services. Along with those updates, a slightly different user experience was shown with categories (aside from the existing labels) to help keep emails properly tagged.

Earlier Friday morning, a Nexus 4 on a trade show floor was pictured running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, sparking a new round of "ooh - Android 4.3 in the wild" and "something looks fishy but the photos still look promising" speculations, but another development in the afternoon weighed in heavily in favor of the picture being real. A video was posted on Facebook (then copied to Google+, then to YouTube...) showing the Android 4.3 camera in action.

A while back, we found out (to no one’s surprise) that Verizon was locking down the bootloader on the Samsung Galaxy S4, but we were surprised when we found out AT&T was also doing this. Thankfully, the development community has pulled through and found a way to work around this. Dan Rosenberg (djrbliss) had unlocked the bootloaders on the AT&T and Verizon variants already, but just Thursday he published an explanation of how the unlock works and a Git repository to aid developers.

The new features for Gmail just keep coming. In this month alone the Gmail team has announced the ability to send money to users via email, merge your storage with that of Google+ and create calendar events from email information. Some companies would hold off and bring these features under one "revolutionary update" for maximum news coverage. Not Google, though - it releases them when they are ready and make a simple announcement through their respective product blogs, including Thursday's announcement of revamped search functionality in Gmail.

We have seen floating notifications before from many different services and programs. Back in January 2011, Google announced desktop notifications for email and chat messages. We still use this notification system today, but now Google is taking it a step further. The Google Chrome team took to its blog Thursday to announce it is bringing "richer notifications" to Google Chrome and the feature is already available through the beta channel.

Samsung's Galaxy S IV already has a Google Edition of its flagship available sans the locked down bootloader, so why announce that developer editions for AT&T and Verizon "coming soon?" At least two reasons come to mind: the Google Edition is only compatible with GSM networks (thus Samsung is throwing Verizon customers a bone), and the Developer Edition will have all the TouchWiz-based goodies since it does not come with stock Android out of the box.

Russel Holly, who accurately predicted the Galaxy S IV Google Edition (which many of us thought would never happen as recently as one day before its announcement at Google I/O), now has unearthed new evidence that HTC may follow suit with its One flagship and may even announce it within two weeks.