– “Android phones already keep their contacts, settings, and app choices synced and backed up, but what about your SMS and call records, your application data, and other Android essentials? There are ways, and the Tested blog runs down the best of them.”

– “Chrome: If you like how Apple Mail adds sender’s pictures to messages, or you’re just better with faces than names, the Gmail Sender’s Picture is a no-brainer. It simply inserts a person’s Google Profile pic into your Gmail conversations with them.”

– “They don’t believe in wires — they think your phone should always be in sync with your Google account, over the air. When you visit the Google music store, you will be presented with a giant catalog of music that can be sent to your phone with a click of a button. No more wires needed, the songs you buy will begin downloading immediately on your phone.

If Google does it right, they may even have a streaming service that lets you log into your account, and play your purchased music through a web-based player (or Google TV?). Gone are the days where you need to store your music on your hard drive, and have it all backed up for the day when your computer dies.”

– Great rundown from Lifehacker about the pros and cons of Microsofts office web apps and Google Docs.

– There is a new beta service out there that will allow you to auto-complete your writing in any application (on a PC). It is called eType.

All you have to do is, well, um, type. By default, eType starts auto-completing words on the third letter, but this can be changed up or down. Word suggestions are based on machine-learning and offer the most probable suggestions, based on what the user is typing out.”

You can then just hit the space or enter to go to the next word. Really neat stuff.

Right now they are in Beta, but you can find out more with the link below.

– TechCrunch has an article today that points out that the Google Voice app is stil being tested, but may not be launched. The reason? Google is steering away from desktop software and wants to do everything in a browser (read: Google ChromeOS… the future of computing).

I really hope that they at least release something. I would love to have a desktop skype-like google voice app… and then later they can release the HTML 5 browser only version.

– “Today, Google Earth released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love. They call it Google Earth 5.2. I call it the Hiker;s Edition. One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.”