There was a time, if you remember, when Motorola dominated the Android landscape with the original Droid in late 2009. Motorola stayed competitive through the next 2-3 years in terms of hardware if not in sales. It seems that the company has taken the year off in 2013, at least until the launch of the highly-anticipated X-phone. If the specs leaked Saturday for the X-phone turn out to be true, it looks like the flagship hiatus will continue.

For the last two years, Samsung has had the "phablet" market mostly to itself. In 2011, there was no phablet market to speak of, as Samsung was the first major manufacturer to take the risk of creating a supersized 5.3-inch phone in a world of sub-5-inch displays. Although the phablet market has gained quite a few competitors since then, none of them could match Samsung's S-Pen functionality. This year, however, at least two major super-sized phones are expected to provide fierce competition to the Galaxy Note 3, each expected to include a stylus.

Still more rumors surfaced Friday about the next Nexus 7, based on visits to the FCC and Bluetooth SIG by an Asus tablet called the "K009" and also tagged by Asus as a "Nexus" tablet. In addition to the previously-rumored 1920x1080 display and the Snapdragon chipset, it appears that this year's Nexus 7 could ship with LTE on board.

By looking quickly at the app updating schedules of Google Apps that cross the boundaries of iOS and Android, it seems as though Google has been preferring Apple lately. Could it be?

Are you on one of those infamous tiered data plans while also trying out Google's new All Access music subscription? If so, you might have been in for a nasty surprise the last time you checked your data usage. It seems that the new app was quite the data-hungry megabytivore, gulping data down like there is no tomorrow. Fortunately, Google updated the app Thursday to allow you to rein in the data usage.

Continuing the long run of Google app updates that began just before the I/O conference is the latest entry, Google+. Yes, the app already received a huge update that included Snapspeed photo editing and a new look and feel, but Google clearly isn't finished with this app yet. This time, Google+ gets sync across devices and a new menu that mimics those of Google's other app updates (such as Gmail, Play Music and Drive).

Do you want to build for Android but for one reason or another cannot install Linux on your PC? Does your PC lack sufficient CPU power, RAM or storage to build ROMs, kernels or apps for Android? If for any reason you can't use your PC at home to build for Android, you might want to try building in the cloud using the CloudBuilder project by RootzWiki member Dr_Drache.