10 Gorgeous Apps For New iPad

(click image for larger view and forslideshow)

In the buildup to Facebook’s big IPO, two Apple iOS applications have seen fit to provide updates that improve upon their individual social networking cred. The Weather Channel for the iPhone and Flipboard for both the iPhone and iPad both bring with them new sharing features that tap into the power of Facebook and Twitter.

Social networking’s tendrils are snaking their way beyond dedicated apps and into a wide range of what normally would be considered non-social apps. The idea is to encourage the dissemination of information–no matter what that information happens to be.

Flipboard

Version 1.9 of Flipboard brings with it several new features, the biggest of which is sound. Rather than limit itself to what you can see and read, Flipboard has partnered with a number of online audio content partners to add a whole new dimension to the application.

Using the app’s navigation tools, it is easy to find and add the audio content to your Flipboard. Some of the big providers are National Public Radio and Public Radio International, both of which offer a number of their programs. In addition to these two, several dozen record companies have thrown their content into the app. It is easy to flip through the (admittedly limited) number of songs being offered by the labels and either give the songs there a spin or add the label to your feed. The sound quality of the songs I sampled was quite excellent.

[ Does the next-gen iPhone's display size really matter? See Bigger iPhone Display: Why Apple Has No Choice. ]

The app also works with SoundCloud, which is sort of like YouTube, but for music and/or sounds. For example, I use SoundCloud to share clips of songs I’ve written for the guitar. For Flipboard users, the SoundCloud integration makes it simpler to access the sounds from the artists you may subscribe to.

All this new content can be shared, of course, via other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, email, and so on.

Last, Flipboard v1.9 adds access for visually impaired users. It uses Apple’s VoiceOver features, which are automatically turned on, and navigational gestures are read aloud, as are the articles once accessed.

Flipboard is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

The Weather Channel

The new version of The Weather Channel app for the iPhone offers a more lush and interactive user interface. It’s less utilitarian in appearance and more “weather-y” thanks to some slick new animations.

For example, the main screen shows the weather for the current location. It also includes access to the user’s bookmarked locations, which can be viewed by swiping left or right. As the user swipes from location to location, the animation changes in correspondence with the weather report for that location (i.e., if it’s rainy in London, the animation shows clouds and rain. It it’s sunny in Paris, the animation clears the clouds and shows the dazzling sun).

As far as the data that’s provided, the base information includes the current temperature, sun level, and/or cloud cover, as well as expected high and low temps. Tap a button and the app produces information regarding the wind, humidity, UV index, dew point, visibility, sunrise/sunset, and barometric pressure.

The app has five little buttons running along the bottom of the screen that provide access to weather maps, videos, social networking, and seasonal data, such as pollen counts, storms, and tides. The social networking tool is an interesting one. It integrates with both Twitter and Facebook, which allow the user to share the weather report with their social networking buds. It also pulls in items such as Twitter updates from random people that are located within the vicinity of the user. Not sure how useful this latter feature is, but hey, it’s “social.”

My one complaint with the app is the advertising. The top 10% or 15% or so of the screen is always consumed by a banner ad. While I was testing the app, the ad was a bright red banner advertising Lexus cars. It distracted me from the nice blue hues of the app itself.

The Weather Channel is available for free (ad supported) or for $ 3.99 (no ads).

As companies increase their use of cloud-based applications, IT and security professionals must make some tough and far-reaching decisions about how to provision, deprovision, and otherwise manage user access. This Dark Reading report, How To Manage Identity In The Public Cloud, examines the options and provides recommendations for determining which one is right for your organization. (Free registration required.)

InformationWeek Personal Tech News

Beware fake Chrome installers for Windows.

A file named “ChromeSetup.exe” is being offered for download on various websites, and the link to the file appears to be legitimately hosted on Facebook and Google domains. In reality, the software won’t install Google’s Chrome browser, but an information-stealing Trojan application known as Banker, according to antivirus vendor Trend Micro.

Once the malware–which appears to be targeting Latin American users, especially in Brazil and Peru–is executed, it relays the IP address and operating system version to one of two command-and-control (C&C) servers, then downloads a configuration file. After that, whenever a user of the infected PC visits one of a number of banking websites, the malware intercepts the HTTP request, redirects the user to a fake banking page, and also pops up a dialog box informing the user that new security software will be installed.

In fact, the malware has been designed uninstall GbPlugin, which is “software that protects Brazilian bank customers when performing online banking transactions,” said Trend Micro security researcher Brian Cayanan in a blog post. “It does this through the aid of gb_catchme.exe–a legitimate tool from GMER called Catchme, which was originally intended to uninstall malicious software. The bad guys, in this case, are using the tool for their malicious agendas.”

[ Hacktivists take down the Kremlin's website in protest of Putin reelection. Read more at Anonymous Targets Russian Sites For Putin Protest. ]

Trend Micro gained access to a log file associated with the C&C servers that were managing this strain of Banker and saw the number of PCs infected with the malware quickly multiply. “During the time the C&C panel was analyzed … the phone-home logs jumped from around 400 to nearly 6,000 in a span of 3 hours. These logs are comprised of 3,000 unique IP addresses, which translates [into] the number of machines infected by the malware,” Cayanan said. But the C&C servers–first spotted in use in October 2011–soon became inaccessible. That suggests that attackers were moving to new C&C servers, he said, noting that whoever is behind Banker will likely continue to enhance the malicious application’s capabilities.

For now, however, Cayanan said Trend Micro was continuing to study the malware, noting that “the one missing piece” of information is how the malware “is able to redirect [users] from normal websites like Facebook or Google to its malicious IP, to download malware.”

In other malware news, GFI Labs is warning that a new piece of Android malware masquerades as free antivirus software. Advertised via Twitter spam promoting links to “sexi gerl see,” among other phrases, the malicious application has been available via websites sporting a dot-TK (.tk) address, which is the top-level domain name for Tokelau, a New Zealand territory in the South Pacific.

Clicking on the proffered Twitter link takes users to a Russian-language Web page–hosted in the Ukraine–that advertises numerous products, including fake updates for Opera and Skype, as well as an “Anit-Virus Scanner.” [sic] “Users who accessed and used this purported scanner are then given the option to download and install a file, which [varies] depending on whether the target is a PC or a phone,” said GFI Labs researcher Jovi Umawing in a blog post. Interestingly, the PC version–delivered as a Java archive file–will fail to execute. But the APK (Android application package) version will install on an Android device. The application’s Android icon, meanwhile, was copied from security firm Kaspersky.

Many security tools will have difficulty spotting the malicious APK file. According to Bulgarian antivirus researcher Vesselin Bontchev at FRISK Software, “the fake AV file is actually server-side polymorphic.” Polymorphic malware is designed to change every time it gets downloaded, which generates malware with identical attack capabilities but different fingerprints. That makes spotting the malware more difficult for signature-based security defenses.

“If you download it several times in a row, you’ll get different APK files,” said Bontchev. He said it’s also likely that the malware developer is updating the attack code every few days to make the malware more difficult to spot.

What’s the purpose of the Anit-Virus Scanner malware? As with most online attacks, blame the software on criminals trying to make a fast buck (or in this case, ruble). “If you went ahead and installed the app onto your mobile, it would attempt to send expensive SMS messages to premium rate services,” read a blog post from Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, who has also been studying the malware.

As with most malware, the fake antivirus scanner also has the ability to download and install further code from the Internet onto your Android smartphone, thus potentially allowing attackers to exploit devices, or the data they store, in numerous other ways.

Security information and event monitoring technology has been available for years, but the information can be hard to mine. In our SIEM Success report, we provide a step-by-step guide to make the most of your SIEM system. (Free registration required.)

InformationWeek Security News

10 Everyday Android Apps For SMBs

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)

If SAP’s Hana in-memory database is to succeed, SAP will need more than just a product to win over customers. That’s why the company highlighted a bevy of partnerships at this week’s SAPPHIRE event in Orlando, Fla., including closer ties with hardware, software, and services firms.

On the hardware front, SAP announced on Wednesday that it has taken its 15-year-old partnership with Intel a level deeper with jointly developed support and optimization for scale-out, multi-node deployments of Hana on Intel servers. Scale-out architecture will enable customers to handle multi-terabyte data sets by adding more servers.

SAP and Intel announced that they themselves have brought the architecture to the extreme with a 100-terabyte system running on Intel Xeon E7 servers that will serve as the foundation of what they described as a petabyte-scale cloud platform.

“With a farm of such systems around the world, we believe that we can run every single ERP system that we have today,” said SAP CTO Vishal Sikka during his keynote presentation on Wednesday.

[ How do SAP Hana and Oracle Exalytics compare? Read SAP's Hype Versus Oracle's FUD. ]

If customers want to keep their deployments on-premises but run them on Hana, they’ll need new hardware, specifically Intel X86-based servers. Sikka noted that Hana-certified servers are now offered by more than half of the server manufacturers that use Intel processors, including Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, and IBM. Sikka and SAP chairman Hasso Plattner singled out IBM, in particular, for close cooperation in offering Hana-ready hardware–perhaps easing the pain of DB2 licenses displaced by SAP’s new database.

The option to scale out opens the door to big-data analytic processing, and on that front SAP also announced the released Service Pack 4 for Hana, which introduces text searching on unstructured and structured data, interoperability with the R open-source statistical language, and in-database predictive and statistical-analysis functions.

The Service Pack 4 announcement might satisfy critics such as Wells Fargo software analyst Jason Maynard, who wrote in an April research note that “SAP should be targeting new areas where Hana’s in-memory technology has a real advantage, rather than trying to replace existing relational database workloads.”

Wells Fargo downgraded SAP’s stock to “market perform” from “outperform” late last month in part because Maynard doesn’t see infrastructure (meaning databases) as SAP’s strength. He wants to see more big-data apps built on Hana.

Opera Solutions, one of many software vendors partnering with SAP on Hana, announced this week that it’s now running its Signal Hub analytic applications on Hana. Signal Hubs tap into large and varied data sets to perform predictive analyses and support decisions on areas such as marketing, spend management, and credit risk. During his keynote, Sikka said Morgan Stanley is a joint customer where Opera has been delivering predictive investment advice using its machine-learning techniques.

“This process used to run on traditional infrastructure, but with Hana it will become dramatically more real-time while also integrating historical trading information,” Sikka said.

SAP is turning to systems integrators for help in selling and implementing Hana, and on that front the vendor announced that Accenture is expanding its SAP practice to promote SAP’s database offerings and particularly Hana. Accenture has committed to adding 1,000 new employees skilled in SAP databases and related applications by the end of 2012, and it also will develop a dedicated research and development capability around Hana.

“We’re seeing the uptake [of Hana] with customers, so we’re doubling down on our investment and we already have a development factory for SAP BW on Hana up and running in our India delivery center,” Mark Willford, global managing director of SAP Business at Accenture, told InformationWeek.

On the development front, Sikka got a hearty round of applause during his keynote when he announced that SAP is making Hana developer licenses available for free. The company also is opening up access to the platform by making developer instances of Hana available on Amazon Web Services. Enterprise applications and SAP expert Dennis Howlett wrote that the moves “put all developers large, small and anywhere in between onto a level playing field.”

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference brings together industry thought leaders to explore the latest innovations in enterprise social software, analytics, and big data tools and technologies. Learn how your business can harness these tools to improve internal business processes and create operational efficiencies. It happens in Boston, June 18-21. Register today!

InformationWeek Software News

10 Everyday Android Apps For SMBs

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)

If SAP’s Hana in-memory database is to succeed, SAP will need more than just a product to win over customers. That’s why the company highlighted a bevy of partnerships at this week’s SAPPHIRE event in Orlando, Fla., including closer ties with hardware, software, and services firms.

On the hardware front, SAP announced on Wednesday that it has taken its 15-year-old partnership with Intel a level deeper with jointly developed support and optimization for scale-out, multi-node deployments of Hana on Intel servers. Scale-out architecture will enable customers to handle multi-terabyte data sets by adding more servers.

SAP and Intel announced that they themselves have brought the architecture to the extreme with a 100-terabyte system running on Intel Xeon E7 servers that will serve as the foundation of what they described as a petabyte-scale cloud platform.

“With a farm of such systems around the world, we believe that we can run every single ERP system that we have today,” said SAP CTO Vishal Sikka during his keynote presentation on Wednesday.

[ How do SAP Hana and Oracle Exalytics compare? Read SAP's Hype Versus Oracle's FUD. ]

If customers want to keep their deployments on-premises but run them on Hana, they’ll need new hardware, specifically Intel X86-based servers. Sikka noted that Hana-certified servers are now offered by more than half of the server manufacturers that use Intel processors, including Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, and IBM. Sikka and SAP chairman Hasso Plattner singled out IBM, in particular, for close cooperation in offering Hana-ready hardware–perhaps easing the pain of DB2 licenses displaced by SAP’s new database.

The option to scale out opens the door to big-data analytic processing, and on that front SAP also announced the released Service Pack 4 for Hana, which introduces text searching on unstructured and structured data, interoperability with the R open-source statistical language, and in-database predictive and statistical-analysis functions.

The Service Pack 4 announcement might satisfy critics such as Wells Fargo software analyst Jason Maynard, who wrote in an April research note that “SAP should be targeting new areas where Hana’s in-memory technology has a real advantage, rather than trying to replace existing relational database workloads.”

Wells Fargo downgraded SAP’s stock to “market perform” from “outperform” late last month in part because Maynard doesn’t see infrastructure (meaning databases) as SAP’s strength. He wants to see more big-data apps built on Hana.

Opera Solutions, one of many software vendors partnering with SAP on Hana, announced this week that it’s now running its Signal Hub analytic applications on Hana. Signal Hubs tap into large and varied data sets to perform predictive analyses and support decisions on areas such as marketing, spend management, and credit risk. During his keynote, Sikka said Morgan Stanley is a joint customer where Opera has been delivering predictive investment advice using its machine-learning techniques.

“This process used to run on traditional infrastructure, but with Hana it will become dramatically more real-time while also integrating historical trading information,” Sikka said.

SAP is turning to systems integrators for help in selling and implementing Hana, and on that front the vendor announced that Accenture is expanding its SAP practice to promote SAP’s database offerings and particularly Hana. Accenture has committed to adding 1,000 new employees skilled in SAP databases and related applications by the end of 2012, and it also will develop a dedicated research and development capability around Hana.

“We’re seeing the uptake [of Hana] with customers, so we’re doubling down on our investment and we already have a development factory for SAP BW on Hana up and running in our India delivery center,” Mark Willford, global managing director of SAP Business at Accenture, told InformationWeek.

On the development front, Sikka got a hearty round of applause during his keynote when he announced that SAP is making Hana developer licenses available for free. The company also is opening up access to the platform by making developer instances of Hana available on Amazon Web Services. Enterprise applications and SAP expert Dennis Howlett wrote that the moves “put all developers large, small and anywhere in between onto a level playing field.”

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference brings together industry thought leaders to explore the latest innovations in enterprise social software, analytics, and big data tools and technologies. Learn how your business can harness these tools to improve internal business processes and create operational efficiencies. It happens in Boston, June 18-21. Register today!

InformationWeek Software News

2012 Salary Survey: 12 Career Insights

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)

It’s common for small and midsize business (SMB) employees to juggle responsibilities well beyond their actual job descriptions. They often do so out of necessity–with fewer people to get things done, flexibility is essential.

Some people might reluctantly fill two (or more) roles because they don’t really have another choice. Not David Hemendinger: He’s both CIO and COO at Summer Infant, but he’s not keeping a seat warm for a new executive hire. Rather, he sees the double-position as a smart business and IT strategy for the publicly traded mid-market firm, which has 240 employees. He also believes it’s the natural evolution of the traditional CIO or CTO role.

“At least in my peer group, we’ve been drawn into the whole business aspect. We know a lot more about finance than we ever knew prior,” Hemendinger said in an interview. (In fact, he recommends old-school IT executives prioritize finance books on their summer reading lists.) “You wouldn’t make it two minutes in most of these types of companies if all you did was focus on technology.”

[ When career paths go awry: read 10 CIOs: Career Decisions I'd Do Over. ]

That’s something Hemendinger thinks his peers should embrace. Among other reasons, the shift might occur whether you’re on board or not. “If you think about it, in most organizations the CIO and the CTO probably know more about the operations than some of the people in those departments that run those operations,” Hemendinger said. “What’s been really cool for me in this position is that I’ve been able to take that technology background and apply that to the operations side as well.”

Hemendinger expects such departmental mash-ups to become a bigger trend, particularly at SMBs. (Indeed, here’s a 600-person company where the CIO is also the CFO.) He points out that “most organizations at this size [have] a hard time trying to find truly qualified people that not only understand technology but what it takes for a small, midcap business to survive these days.” More importantly, Hemendinger has found clear-cut advantages in the hybrid role that would not have been possible–or at least would have been much slower to materialize–had operations and technology been separate departments under separate leadership. That’s often the results of applying technology solutions to operational problems, without a lot of unnecessary red tape.

An example: When Hemendinger took the job–pardon me, jobs–he quickly realized that one of Summer Infant’s necessary business processes was creating a major resource drain. The company makes a wide range of baby products, and it does a ton of retail analysis. That includes sending employees into stores such as Babies R Us to gather competitive intelligence about pricing, product placement, and a mass of other data.

“It’s extremely valuable to us in our market, but it’s also extremely time-consuming and inefficient and requires a lot of feet on the ground,” Hemendinger said. In fact, there are five or six pairs of feet doing the work in painfully manual fashion: “This was all they did, and when I saw the way they were doing it, I thought ‘oh wow, we can re-engineer this really fast.’” They deployed a mix of tablets, laptops, Dragon voice-dictation technology, and handheld wireless barcode readers to streamline and automate much of the data capture and subsequent documentation processes. Deployment happened “very quickly”–Hemendinger just joined the company last November–and he credits that to the combined technology and operations department.

He sees other upsides in the COO/CIO approach, including easier systems integration, potential cost savings, and less corporate bureaucracy. The latter often is an area where SMBs can gain an upper hand on larger competitors. On the integration front, Summer Infant had previously not given much thought to connecting critical systems. “The focus was trying to make each one of those best-of-breed from a departmental level,” he said, rather than applying an “enterprise mentality” to ensure optimal performance. Since subsequently integrating Summer Infant’s ERP, sales forecasting, and warehouse systems, sales forecast accuracy has increased 2%. “That’s tremendous,” Hemendinger said.

There are potential downsides to the hybrid tech exec. Hemendinger said a company could outgrow the double-role, to the point where there’s simply more work than one person can reasonably get done. (InformationWeek Editor Chris Murphy recently took a look at a similar phenomenon inside larger enterprises.) Another risk comes with any situation where the person holds two titles in name only, but isn’t truly granted the information and authority needed to get both jobs done. That’s a recipe for failure.

“Let’s say that they’re not truly given the opportunity to fully understand all of the aspects of both the IT side of it and the operational side of it,” Hemendinger said. “They need to be in control of both. If you don’t have the empowerment to drive both, I think the job gets very sticky, very quickly.”

From clouds to mobile to software development, threats may be everywhere, but they’re not equally dangerous. The new, all-digital IT Strategic Security Survey issue of InformationWeek will help you prioritize. Also in this issue: IT must decide how to deal with consumer cloud storage being used in businesses. (Free registration required.)

InformationWeek Global CIO News

2012 Salary Survey: 12 Career Insights

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)

A U.S. senator has introduced legislation that would replace a program which reserves up to 55,000 permanent resident visas for foreign nationals through a lottery with one that saves the same number of so-called green cards for students graduating from advanced science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs at U.S. universities.

“In the global competition for the world’s best and brightest minds in math and science, the United States should take a backseat to no one,” said Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), in statement.

Cornyn’s bill, the Securing the Talent America Requires for the 21st Century (STAR) Act, would allocate 55,000 green cards to foreign students enrolled in graduate level STEM programs at U.S. institutions. To offset those visas, the so-called diversity lottery would be eliminated. The latter program is intended to boost immigration from underrepresented countries.

Cornyn said those visas would be better saved for individuals who can bring high-tech skills to the U.S. economy. “I am confident the STAR Act will bolster American competitiveness and provide a stronger foundation for long-term economic growth and job creation,” said Cornyn.

[ Why do American employers say they can't fill their high-tech jobs with domestic workers? See Skills Shortage? Quit Whining. ]

As the visa system currently stands, foreign tech grads can generally work in the United States on temporary, H-1B visas. But those visas are good only for a maximum of six years, after which many H-1B workers are forced to return to their native countries because there is no direct path from the H-1B to an employment-based green card.

Tech companies and immigration advocates have long maintained that the United States needs to make it easier for workers with advanced STEM skills to remain in the country, arguing that the supply of domestic tech workers is insufficient to meet current demand. Microsoft recently opened a campus in Vancouver, Canada, about 130 miles north of its Redmond, Wash. headquarters, which it is stocking with overseas workers that were unable to obtain U.S. visas.

“The American economy needs these highly sought after graduates, and we can’t afford to let our U.S. immigration system fall behind in the global race for talent by losing these graduates to foreign competitors,” said Lynn Shotwell, executive director of the American Council on International Personnel. ACIP supports the STAR Act.

Presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney also supports liberalization of immigration rules for tech specialists. “I’d staple a green card to the diploma of anybody who’s got a degree in math, science, a Master’s degree, PhD,” Romney said during a debate in November.

But critics of Cornyn’s bill say it ignores the fact that there are thousands of unemployed, U.S.-born tech pros still looking for work after having been laid off in recent years, whether because of the economic downturn or other reasons, like outsourcing. “If Senator Cornyn wants to secure talent in the U.S. he should be more concerned with the vast number of U.S. tech workers losing their jobs as work is offshored,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator for Alliance@IBM, a group that advocates on behalf of IBM workers.

Cornyn introduced the STAR Act to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and Border Security. The subcommittee has yet to act on the bill.

Hacktivist and cybercriminal threats concern IT teams most, our first Federal Government Cybersecurity Survey reveals. Here’s how they’re fighting back. Also in the new, all-digital Top Federal IT Threats issue of InformqtionWeek Government: Why federal efforts to cut IT costs don’t go far enough, and how the State Department is enhancing security. (Free registration required.)

InformationWeek Global CIO News

10 Ways To Get More From Your Android Device

(click image for larger view and for slideshow)

Google plans to give five hardware makers early access to Android 5.0 Jelly Bean and will sell the resulting handsets directly to consumers via the Google Play Store. This is a huge change in strategy for Google’s Nexus program–and one that will likely pay off big-time.

Citing sources familiar with Google’s plans, the Wall Street Journal reports the impetus behind this change is to give Google more control over what features and applications are available on the handsets. Google hopes to sidestep the level of control exerted by wireless network operators, who often install their own apps and services on smartphones they sell with wireless contracts.

[ For more on Google's acquisition of Motorola, see Google Debates Fate Of Motorola Smartphone Business. ]

Google first sold the Nexus One, which was made by HTC, directly to consumers without a contract via a dedicated website in January 2010. The device was sold at full retail price and initially worked with T-Mobile USA’s network. Less than a year later, Google shut the program down due to low uptake on the device. Google found out what Apple did: selling smartphones at $ 500 or $ 600 a pop isn’t easy. The subsidies provided by wireless network operators are able to bring smartphone prices down to a more palatable $ 200 or $ 300.

Last month, Google resumed direct-to-consumer sales of the current Nexus device, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It is being sold without a contract and can be used on the networks run by AT&T and T-Mobile USA. It can be purchased from the Google Play Store for $ 400.

To date, Google has always stuck with a single manufacturer for Nexus devices. Why change to five? There are at least half a dozen probable reasons:

First, providing early access to five OEMs should abate fears that Google will give preference to Motorola’s hardware division, which it is in the process of acquiring. Many are wary of how Google’s relationship as Motorola’s owner will play out. Though Google has gone on the record saying there will be a “firewall” between the Android software and Motorola hardware teams, spreading the Nexus love to other OEMs should put those concerns to rest.

Second, it should ease Google’s relationship with handset makers that may feel left out of the “lead device” Nexus program. So far, HTC and Samsung have been tapped for Nexus devices, while other Android manufacturers such as Motorola, LG, Pantech, Huawei, Sony, ZTE, ASUS, Dell, and others have been left out. Were Google to continually stick with one OEM, it could foster resentment. This should help in that regard.

Third, Nexus devices should receive system-level Android updates faster, which makes for happier customers. Historically, Google has provided major new versions of Android to its base of Nexus devices before other devices. Case in point: Google updated the Nexus S to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich long before other OEMs and carriers rolled out the Android 4.0 update to their devices.

Fourth, it will prevent carriers from blocking apps. As the Journal points out, Verizon Wireless has blocked Google Wallet from the Galaxy Nexus device that it sells. Blocking this app prevents Galaxy Nexus owners from using Google’s mobile payment service, which it is trying hard to expand.

Fifth, fans of the stock Android experience will have a much better selection of handsets. Under the current model, the single Nexus device is typically the only one available that hasn’t been modified by the carriers. With five stock Android devices available, those who prefer the unadulterated code will enjoy greater choice.

Last, it could help boost sagging sales of Android tablets. Google is reportedly working with ASUS to bring a low-cost Android tablet to market, which it intends to sell directly to consumers via the Google Play Store. With stock Android tablets that don’t require carrier contracts available at low cost to consumers, it is possible consumers will go to Google for their tablets rather than other low-cost providers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

According to the Journal, all this is going to be up and running by Thanksgiving. Google will likely reveal more details at its I/O developer conference, scheduled for next month.

At this interactive Enterprise Mobility Virtual Event, experts and solution providers will offer detailed insight into how to bring some order to the mobile industry innovation chaos. When you register, you will gain access to live webcast presentations and virtual booths packed with free resources. It happens May 17.

InformationWeek Hardware News