At an event in Hong Kong this morning, Google in conjunction with Samsung, has unveiled the long awaited Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS and Google Nexus Prime smartphone.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 4.0 is the latest version of the ever popular smartphone OS from Google, the new version will be compatible with both phones and tablets and features a whole new interface.

Google has also added new virtual buttons in the system bar, eliminating the need for hardware buttons altogether and making more space for valuable screen real estate. One of the strong aspects of Android has always been its multitasking capabilities, with Ice Cream Sandwich Google has made multitasking even more easier and visual. The recent Apps button enables users to jump easily between running Apps but popping up a visual list of current running Apps with thumbnails and allow users to simply switch by the tap of a thumbnail.

Android 4.0 now has new home screen folders, users can now simply drag apps or shortcuts onto one another to create to group their Apps logically, in addition to that uninstalling or getting more information about Apps also got allot easier. From the App Launcher users can drag an App to get more information from it or uninstall it.

A nice new feature added in Ice Cream Sandwich is the resizable widget functionality. Users can now resize widgets on home screens to enable them to show more content should they wish.

In addition to the above features, Android 4.0 also features a new voice engine, better control over network users, users can now actually see how many bytes each App uses, new screen lock actions like facial recognition, improved text input and spell-checking.

The camera has also seen some significant improvements, users now have continuous focus and zero shutter lag, meaning your shots will be taken instantly, something that got me quite irritated in Android 2.3. There is also new panoramic functionality that will stitch fotos for you and new face detection technology. You can also now edit photos after you took them and add live effects to videos.

Functionality that Android lacked for a few years now was the ability to take screenshots, you could get it done but then you had to root your phone or use a USB cable and Android SDK, but users can now take screenshot by pressing hardware buttons.

This is just a few of the new features that makes Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich so great, I for one can’t wait to give it test, it just looks good and its easy to see that this will be the best version of Android to date.

Getting a job at Google is a dream of almost any Geek, I mean who wouldn’t want to work at Google? Google does not operate like any conventional company out there, infact they never intend to either.

At Google they focus on the needs of the employee and does whatever it takes to make you happy, whether is be that you work more productive with your poodle lying on its mattress next to you, or just dishing up some awesome gourmet food from their cafeteria. I mean what other company out there gives a man one month maternity leave when his son or daughter is born?

The kind folk over at JobVine has put together this infographic showing just what it takes to get a job at Google and the average salary different positions inside the company earn.

It feels like just the other day that Google revamped the Android Market giving it a great new look, but it seems the Google Mobile team has been at it again.

Google yesterday announced in a blog post that they have been working hard at improving the Android Market and has now released a brand new version. The new Android Market not just gives you new ways to find great applications and games, but the company has now also introduced movie rentals and book purchases.

Movie rentals and book purchases will however only be available to U.S. users, but you can see Google has put allot of thought into this as when you rent a movie or purchase a book it gets linked to your Google account making it instantly available across all of your devices - computer, phone, or tablet.

The new Android Market layout overhaul makes it faster, easier, and more fun to discover great apps, movies, and books. Google has not just increased the space to feature some of the most interesting content of the week, but they have also introduced staff picks and editors’ choice sections in addition to new top chart sections that will showcase the most interesting apps of the week.

The new Android Market will only be available to Android handsets running Android 2.2 Froyo and up and will be rolled out to users around the world in the coming weeks.

So everybody has been going on about this Google Chrome extension you can install that basically scrapes your Facebook friends data from Facebook and exports it to you in CSV format, however now Facebook has blocked the scraping techniques and the extension is useless, luckily there is a legal way of getting your Facebook friends contact information.

Yahoo may not be the search giant it used to be back in the day, but it has some awesome tools, and one such tool is its address book. See, Yahoo is a Facebook partner and because of that they get access to certain info users apps using the normal Facebook API can not get hold of, like the email address of your friend.

Exporting your Facebook friends to Google+ is a fairly easy operation, but it does involve a few sites.

1. Create a Yahoo! Address Book account.
2. Log into Yahoo! Address Book and click the Facebook Import Contacts button.
3. Authorise Yahoo! to access your Facebook data.
4. You should now have gotten a message saying x amount of contacts was imported.
5. Log into Google+ and head to the Circles section.
6. Click on the Find and Invite tab and then click on the Find Friends: Yahoo! link.
7. Authorise Google+ to access your Yahoo! contacts and they should now appear in the list.
8. Add them to a new circle called Facebook Friends and then post an update to that circle.

As easy as that and you will have all you Facebook friends in Google+, however they may not receive an invite as Google only opens invites every now and then, but atleast when they join Google+ one day you will be following them already.

If you are on Google+ you can follow me here.

Google has launched the long awaited plus one (+1) button to compete head on with Facebook’s like button.

It’s evident with the release of the Google plus one button that search is getting social, so now you may ask but how does the plus one button work? To put it simple it works just like the Facebook like button would work, but instead of recommending the item you plus one’d on Facebook, Google will show these recommendation in search results to your friends and contacts.

The Google plus one button is available to everybody to use on their websites from today and embedding it is really simple as well. Simply head over to Google.com/+1button and grab the embedding code, it also comes in an array of different sizes.

For more information check out the Google plus one video

There comes a time in every blog’s existence when you have no choice but to start serving ads to cover costs, I started serving ads since day one as I was hosting local and had to cover the cost of the very expensive local hosting bill monthly.

Unfortunately for me I did not see great returns on my Google Adsense units and was almost at the point where I wanted to pull the whole idea as I was forced to pay the local hosting bill out of my own pocket, but instead of dropping Google Adsense I started playing around with different sizes and the placement of the ads and it paid off withing a few weeks.

Naturally you can’t expect much revenue from ads if you do not have loads of traffic, but a comment on iMod, and the good timing of a Google’s Adsense mail package lead me to this post.

So how can you increase your Google Adsense revenue in just a few weeks? With just a few tweaks here and there you could be earning way more than you are already earning from your Google Adsense units.

Go Wide
Not many know this but smaller Google Adsense ads does not perform well, rather then going with the smaller format why not switch over to one of the top performing Google Adsense units? According to Google, wider ad formats tend to perform better as they are easier to read, and they are also preferred by advertisers. Try switching to one of the bellow Google Adsense units:

• 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
• 728 x 90 Leaderboard
• 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

More is better
Increase the number of Google Adsense units per page to three, this can be particularly successful on pages with allot of text on them. Also place ads near rich content and locations where users may be focusing their attention. Try adding a 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle at the end of your articles or blogposts.

Enable text and image ads
The Google Adsense system automatically shows ads that will deliver the highest earnings for you, setting up your Google Adsense units to show both text and images will increase the number of ads competing to appear on your pages, leading to higher revenue delivering ads.

Make your ads visible
Position your ads where users can actually see them without the need to scroll down, this is called placing them “above the fold”. Above the fold ads are premium locations and are generally more attractive to advertisers who pay for impressions rather than clicks.

Blend you ads in
Google Adsense has this nice feature where you can actually customise the look and feel of your ads, select colours that complements your site, specially for the borders and backgrounds of your ads. Google recommends creating a borderless look by setting the border and background colour to be the same as the colour of the page the ad appears on.

So there you have it, by just tweaking your Google Adsense units and incorporating the above guidelines you can already start earning a bit more. If you have got any tips feel free to leave them in the comments.

A while back Leaf the local distributor of HTC phones in South Africa announced that South Africa will be getting access to Paid Android Apps, Google last night confirmed this by announcing at their I/O conference that full Android Market access will be coming to South Africa and an additional 98 other countries.

As of last night some South African users have reported to already have access to paid applications on the Android Market, I however checked and could only find one paid application namely QuickOffice Pro that is going for R68.73. I also tried buying apps through the online Android web store, but this did not work either.

In the mean time while we wait for the service to roll out fully to all South Africa users you can set up a Google Checkout Account, as that will be used to pay for your applications.

Since Google acquired publishing platform Blogger in 2003 nothing much has really changed when it comes to looks for the 11 year old blogging platform, but Google has big plans.

Blogger may be the sixth largest websites in the world but when you compare it to the likes of WordPress, the blogging platform does not stack up very well. Taking into consideration how well the adoption of WordPress has taken up with online publishers one might even argue that WordPress has overtaken Blogger.

Seems like Google is feeling the threat from WordPress and announced in a blog post that 2011 will be an exciting year for the Blogger platform with the introduction of a brand new next-generation user interface that will go live later this year.

Below is two screenshot Google shared of how the new Blogger dashboard and post editor will look.

So what do you think? I think it looks pretty cool and refreshed.

In December 2010, Google announced their latest Smartphone to the market called the Nexus S, since then the Nexus S has only been available in a few select stores in Europe and South America, but that is set to change.

Vodafone has announced yesterday that the Nexus S will be available in all Vodafone store around the world soon and that includes South Africa.

Vodacom has confirmed that they will offer the Google Nexus S with its 4″ curved super AMOLED screen, 1GHz Hummingbird processor, and 16GB storage in South Africa but can not yet comment on the exact date the device will be available.

Why would you want the Google Nexus S as appose to other already locally available Android handsets? To put it simple, the answer is updates. The Nexus S is a Google phone meaning it runs no custom software, just plain Android. Because it runs vanilla Android, users of the Nexus S will get updates as soon as they are available ensuring that they always run the latest Android operating system where as if you have an HTC phone you would probably only get updates a year later because the manufacturer runs custom written software on top of Android.

Would you consider getting yourself the Google Nexus S?

At an even last night in Mountain View, Google announced the long awaited Android Market website http://market.android.com

For long the only way Android users could explore the Android Market was through the Market app on their mobile phones, which was frustrating and compared to other App Stores, like the Apple App Store, a bit disappointing.

The new Android Market Website is set to change that by allowing Android users to browse through all the apps in the Android Market by category or introduce them to the latest top free and featured apps.

Android users also have the ability to search, something that was previously missing from the old App Marketplace. But for me the greatest feature has to be the auto app download to your phone, with a simple click on the Android Market Website you can request the selected application to download to your phone and install without you needing to touch your phone.

The Android Market Website is clean, fast and easy to browse its easy to see that this will be a hit amongst Android users.

What do you think about the new Android Market Website?