This week we are do­ing things a lit­tle dif­fer­ent on the tech page hav­ing our first in­stall­ment of "First To Know," a se­ries in which we keep you in the know on what's hap­pen­ing in the dig­i­tal world. Top­ping the tech sto­ries this week is - Has Google launched a mys­te­ri­ous por­tal? The ru­mours are true and be­low we will tell you ex­act­ly where to find this por­tal. Al­so this week we are fol­low­ing four oth­er hot sto­ries in tech - An­dri­od phones vs. ap­ple phones: who's win­ning? Has Google be­gun the launch­ing of their equiv­a­lent to face­book's 'like' but­ton? Are the lat­est HP Touch­pads al­ready out in stores? Let's get in­to it.

Google Now Ac­ti­vat­ing 500,000 An­droid De­vices Per Day

For those of you who think the ap­ple iphone is giv­ing the an­droid de­vis­es stiff com­pe­ti­tion, think again! Ac­cord­ing to re­ports Google is now ac­ti­vat­ing half a mil­lion An­droid de­vices per day, up 100,000 per day since it last dis­closed num­bers a month ago. This was an­nounced last week on twit­ter by Google An­droid chief Andy Ru­bin. Re­al­ly half a mil­lion of de­vis­es sold A DAY!? Wow....we might as well pre­pare our­selves for a to­tal an­droid takeover com­plete with a green lit­tle Ro­bot army ;-) (for the ben­e­fit of those of us who do not know: the green ro­bot is the An­dri­od mas­cot). No re­al­ly the sit­u­a­tion is as­tound­ing when you con­sid­er that as of De­cem­ber that num­ber was on­ly 300,000 per day – that's a 60-per­cent in­crease in just over sev­en months. There might not be enough food and potable wa­ter to sus­tain the Earth's ever grow­ing pop­u­la­tion, but at least every­one will be able to tweet about it (say what!?).

HP Touch­pad Ap­pear­ing in Stores Ear­ly

Yes the ru­mours are true at least when it comes to de­mo units of the HP Touch­pad. Ac­cord­ing to video ev­i­dence that has been float­ing around on the In­ter­net, these De­mo HP Touch­pad units are al­ready ap­pear­ing in Best Buy and Wal­mart stores in the US. Hope­ful­ly it will not be too long be­fore they hit Tri­ni stores, I mean we Tri­ni's want to 'de­mo' too! Well ... I know I do.

Google +1 Goes Glob­al

Yes Google's +1 but­ton, the search gi­ant's chal­lenger to the Face­book Like but­ton, is fi­nal­ly mak­ing its world­wide de­but. "To­day, +1's will start ap­pear­ing on Google search pages glob­al­ly," Google an­nounced on their Ad­sense blog last week. "We'll be start­ing off with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr, then ex­pand­ing quick­ly to most oth­er Google search sites soon af­ter." So don't get too ex­cit­ed guys, it may be a lit­tle while again un­til it hits google.tt how­ev­er, it is sure in com­ing.

Sam­sung to Re­lease First Ice Cream Sand­wich Phone?

Un­for­tu­nate­ly Sam­sung has duped us with this ti­tle. Through ex­ten­sive re­search sad­ly we found no phone be­ing sold now or no phone in de­vel­op­ment that is made from ice cream or the com­bi­na­tion of ice cream and a sand­wich! So what is Sam­sung talk­ing about here? Well 'Ice cream sand­wich' is the name of Google's new An­droid plat­form which the next gen­er­a­tion of Sam­sung phones will be built us­ing. Sam­sung will be the first to man­u­fac­ture a smart­phone based on this 'de­li­cious sound­ing' tech­nol­o­gy.

Google Launch­es Mys­te­ri­ous Search Por­tal

Now for our fi­nal and biggest sto­ry - Google has launched a new, mys­te­ri­ous ser­vice called 'What Do You Love'. It's a sim­ple search box, sim­i­lar to the one on Google's home­page, but it re­turns re­sults from more than 20 dif­fer­ent Google ser­vices, in­clud­ing Google Trans­late, Trends, YouTube, Maps and Groups. The re­sults are pre­sent­ed in lit­tle box­es that can, in some cas­es, be ex­pand­ed by click­ing on the icon in the low­er right cor­ner. If you need even more re­sults, you can al­ways click the but­ton in the up­per right cor­ner of the box and go di­rect­ly to the cho­sen ser­vice.

The con­cept re­minds us of iGoogle, a ser­vice that lets you add sim­ple apps to your own per­son­alised por­tal. What Do You Love, how­ev­er, in­stant­ly cre­ates a mi­ni-por­tal about any term you choose, which makes it a nice op­tion for users who don't have the time to tin­ker with op­tions and sim­ply want to have ac­cess to Google's many ser­vices on one page. "The ser­vice, lo­cat­ed on the ad­dress www.wdyl.com and google.com/what­doy­oulove, bears Google's copy­right mark but very lit­tle ex­pla­na­tion, and it hasn't so far been an­nounced on any of Google's of­fi­cial blogs. This no doubt means that a lot of peo­ple are check­ing out this page. I am not cer­tain about you but we are go­ing to try both site links un­til we get through.

Con­tri­bu­tions from: news.ya­hoo.com

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