Recently Statcounter, a market research company released numbers based on visitor statistics averaged from 3+ million websites. The numbers show the iPAD has surpassed Linux as an alternative desktop OS. This is impressive considering the iPAD has only been around for a year and it actually surpassed Linux in December of last year.

These results don’t include Android powered devices, iPod touch and iPhone browsing numbers. We all know there are many more iPods and iPhones on the market than Android powered devices.

Are tablets fads or are they here to stay?

What do you Geek-Freaks think about these numbers?

source: Pingdom

Froyo and Gingerbread. Froyo will be built upon Linux Kernel 2.6.32 while Gingerbread will be based on 2.6.33 or 2.6.34. The two known bits of information on Froyo (other than it’s kernel) is that it is expected to be released as as update for the HTC EVO 4G and that it will include functionality for 4G radios. An interesting technical tidbit that may interest the über Android Geeker about the patches that are made to the Android Linux Kernel is the following post by Brian Swetland, who is head of the Android Kernel development team-

We maintain a set of patches on top of Linux, which we periodically rebase to the latest released Linux kernel. We’ve been doing this roughly every other kernel release since about 2.6.14. This week we’re finalizing our move to 2.6.32 for the Android “Froyo” release, and we’ll likely be on .33 or .34 for “Gingerbread”.

These patches fall roughly into four buckets:
– random bugfixes (these are usually pretty easy to submit upstream)
– generic Android related drivers that are standalone (lowmemorykiller, binder, ashmem, logger, etc): These pieces are used by the Android userspace, but not other kernel drivers.
– generic Android related drivers that add new infrastructure. Wakelocks are pretty much the only significant piece here. They are depended on my peripheral drivers, but that can be conditionalized.
– support for new SoCs (msm7k, msm8k, etc) and boards/devices (G1, myTouch, NexusOne, Droid, etc) – they live under arch/arm/mach-*/… and don’t have many special dependencies other than wakelocks (which can be conditionalized)

I wonder what the next version of Android will be codenamed. Maybe Hotcakes? Post your best guess in the comments below!

Source- lwn.net via androidandme.com