Carrying a Sprint Evo phone used to make you feel special, in a geeky way.

It was the first true 4G wireless phones when it debuted in 2010, showcasing the Clearwire-powered WiMax network.

With a huge screen, sleek black case and powerful processor, the Evo was the baddest phone on the block. As long as the battery held out.

Now Sprint's releasing a more powerful version that I've been testing, the HTC Evo 4G LTE.

You feel special carrying this Evo, too, but for different reasons.

For one thing, it's contraband.

Imports of the new Evo were blocked this month by U.S. Customs, delaying its May 18 launch. The phones are being reviewed to see if they comply with a court ruling in a patent spat between Apple and HTC.

The Evo -- and an HTC One phone for AT&T that's also held up -- are casualties of Steve Jobs' going "thermonuclear" on Google's Android software.

I think the late Mr. Jobs is doing Sprint customers a favor by delaying the Evo's release.

The Evo's biggest selling point is that it uses fast, new 4G LTE network technology. LTE is becoming the new standard for smartphones in the U.S. and soon every major network will offer it.

Sprint plans to have LTE across its network in 2013.

The problem is, Sprint doesn't yet offer LTE coverage anywhere. It's promising coverage by "midyear" in six cities -- Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, San Antonio, Kansas City -- but won't say where it's coming next.

Yet it began selling LTE phones in April.

These phones also work on Sprint's 3G network, which is being upgraded, but there's no comparison to LTE speeds. Current LTE phones also won't work with the LTE capacity-boosting service Clearwire is providing Sprint next year.

This is like selling color TVs limited to black and white content. It's infuriating if you're already used to the newer technology.

I began testing the Evo the day President Obama was in town. Downloads were so slow I wondered if the Secret Service had jammed the network.

I tried watching a high-def YouTube trailer for "The Expendables 2." It was maddeningly slow, so I tried it on the free Wi-Fi at a McDonald's. It still froze and buffered more than a dozen times.

I tried the same video on the bus ride home, over Sprint's 3G network. The sound of gunshots roared out of the Evo's "Beats" audio system so I pressed the volume button, and the phone completely froze.

After a reboot, the video "loading" icon spun for another mile. Finally it began playing as I stepped off the bus, then paused to buffer 25 seconds later.

Network aside, I found the Evo to be a nice phone with an 8 megapixel camera, good call quality and far better battery life than the 2010 Evo.

Despite a massive 4.7-inch display, the $200 Evo feels light and easy to hold.

From the front, the case is plain but handsome. The back has an odd combination of shiny and matte plastic, divided by a red aluminum kickstand. It's not as striking as the original Evo or as svelte as the HTC One series (T-Mobile's One at left).

The first Evo's battery barely made it past lunchtime. I could use the new one lightly for well over a day without recharging. Sprint claims 7.5 hours of talk time, but the battery is "embedded" and can't be replaced by users.

There are many layers of capability in the Evo, which runs the latest "Ice Cream Sandwich" version of Android.

Especially prominent is an assortment of preloaded media apps. This profusion of digital storefronts is a little confusing.

Google's "Play" store and service get a home-screen icon and appear in the corner when you scroll through multiple screens filled with apps. "Play Movies" and "Play Music" also link to Google services. "Music" opens a folder with other music apps and "Watch" launches HTC's video store.

Another app, called "Media Share," is designed to connect the phone to a Wi-Fi network and share media files. I thought it would be cool to rent a movie from HTC and play it back through my home network, but I couldn't connect the phone. This was probably a user error, but it should be easier.

The Evo also has the ballyhooed Google Wallet and NFC capability. Wallet lets you load credit-card info, which is permanently linked to your Google account. Wallet also stores retail-loyalty cards, and Google will use it to send you coupons and offers.

With near-field communications hardware, you can wave the phone near special credit-card readers at some stores to make a payment.

That may appeal to some, but to me the convenience isn't worth giving Google my credit information. It's like giving Cookie Monster keys to the Keebler factory. If Google wants that access, it should provide a free phone and wireless service in return.

Others may also be excited to have a truly next generation phone like the HTC Evo 4G LTE.

It's a fine phone, but users will be paying $80 per month to use it on a last-generation network for a significant part of their two-year contract.

Here are the phone's specs, via HTC:

Network: LTE (Band 25) and CDMA 1xRTT EVDO Rel. 0, EVDO Rev. A
Dimensions: 5.31" (L) x 2.72" (W) x 0.35" (T)
Keyboard/Form Factor: Virtual QWERTY
Weight: 4.73 ounces
Operating System: Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with HTC Sense
Display: 4.7-inch 1280x720 HD with IPS technology (In Plane Switching); Capacitive touch screen
Battery: 2000 mAh
Camera: (Main): 8MP color CMOS with auto focus; (Front): 1.3MP color CMOS Front Camera; Back Side-Illuminated (BSI Sensor); HTC ImageChip
Memory: 1GB RAM, 16GB ROM, microSDHC compatible
GPS: GPS/AGPS
Connectivity: Bluetooth 3.0+, 3.5mm Stereo audio jack, Micro USB connector with MHL, NFC, WiFi: IEEE 802.11 A,B,G,N
Processor: 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon Qualcomm MSM8960

Here's a photo taken with the HTC Evo 4G LTE, of the site of Amazon.com's forthcoming office towers:

If Microsoft is ever going to have its Alec Baldwin moment, it will happen because of a home-brew game called "Wordament."

Baldwin was famously thrown off a plane in December because he wouldn't stop playing an addictive word game on his iPhone.

The actor was playing "Words With Friends," Zynga's Facebook version of Scrabble played by more than 8 million people a day.

So far the closest thing on the Windows Phone platform is "Wordament," an extracurricular project of two Microsoft employees that became a surprise hit after its debut last year.

The free, ad-supported app is a twist on the word-hunt board game "Boggle." You compete with players around the world in two-minute matches and work your way up leader boards.

It's still a pipsqueak in the broader world of mobile games, with hundreds of thousands of downloads since it appeared on Windows Phone in April 2011 and on Windows 8 last month. It has tens of thousands of unique visitors a day, with up to about 650 playing together at once.

But as one of the highest-rated, exclusive games on those platforms, it's positioned to lift off. It may even draw people to Microsoft's fledgling mobile devices, at least if they're "Boggle" fans.

The game was created as a side project by John Thornton, 37, and Jason Cahill, 38, who worked on the Windows Live photo team and had offices next to each other. They built the game after Microsoft began a "moonlighting" program in 2010, encouraging employees to build Windows Phone apps in their free time.

Thornton (left) began tinkering with word games and made a New Year's resolution in January 2011 to build an app a month. One was a prototype puzzle game he showed to Cahill and asked if he wanted to help. The answer was no, initially.

Cahill (right) and his wife were "Boggle" fans who played against each other wirelessly on Nintendo DS handhelds. The more he thought about the possibilities of a computer-generated game board connected via Internet services, the more excited he became about the project.

"I went home after telling him this whole lecture on how the way you get ahead at work is by doing work and not by doing moonlighting ... and ground all weekend,"Cahill said. "I came in Monday with a basic implementation of a service and a set of puzzles and I was like, 'OK, can I help on this half' ?"

This still cracks up Thornton.

"He must have coded the whole weekend after telling me no," he said. "It was kind of funny."

Thornton said the game's popularity sank in for him a few months later, at the Kirkland Fourth of July parade. Looking over the shoulders of a row of people in front of him, he noticed they were all playing the game.

Later that month, the Xbox Live group asked them to distribute "Wordament" through the game service. The Xbox group then hired them, where they're now the principals of a new studio expanding "Wordament" and developing new titles.

I heard about "Wordament" last year from a friend and fellow "Boggle" fan at Microsoft and was planning to write about the game after the Windows 8 preview version (left) was released in February. But I waited, partly because the game froze on a Samsung Windows 8 tablet I've been using. I wondered if the newsroom installed some kind of filter, because I'd spent so much time testing "Wordament" on the tablet.

Finally I got in touch with Cahill last week, and he explained that the Windows 8 version is a prototype and they're preparing a fix for the "suspend/resume" issue I encountered. Meanwhile, the trick to unfreezing it is the "downward swipe" gesture that closes and exits Metro-style apps.

The game can be played with a mouse but it works best with touch-screens, on which you mark words by sliding your finger across the letters. Speed and responsiveness are critical, so the game's a good way to sample the performance of a phone or tablet.

"Wordament" seems to be a game that Xbox Live could use to expand on platforms such as Apple's iPhone and iPad.

I wonder if "Wordament" will end up preloaded, alongside "Solitaire," on Windows Phones or Windows 8 tablets when they appear later this year.

The original goal with "Solitaire" on Windows was to teach people to use a computer mouse, so perhaps "Wordament" will help familiarize people with the new Windows 8 touch gestures.

That would propel the game into the "Words With Friends" league.

It could also offset productivity gains promised by the new software, though, and potentially cause problems for Alec Baldwin types.

Bus riders in the greater Seattle area have a friend in Switzerland.

That would be Brian Ferris, the University of Washington computer-science student who graduated in the summer and now works for Google, in Zurich. (He's pictured below in his UW office in May.)

Ferris built and ran One Bus Away, a collection of phone apps that inform riders when buses are expected to arrive at their stop, using data shared by transit agencies.

His hobby morphed into a Ph.D. project and a job with Google's Zurich office, where the search giant does much of its mapping and navigation work.

That was great for Ferris and Google, but it left One Bus Away's users in limbo. They continue to use the service more than 50,000 times a week, accessing it via smartphones, browsers and a dial-in system at 206-456-0609.

Fortunately, the UW has continued to run the system -- on servers in the Computer Science & Engineering Department -- while the school and regional transit agencies hashed out a plan.

It could have gotten sticky earlier this month. King County Metro did a major restructuring of its network Oct. 1, changing dozens of routes, adding a new rapid line and rerouting others to deal with the Alaskan Way Viaduct project.

Those changes introduced glitches in One Bus Away that needed to be fixed, even though the agencies were still negotiating who would pick up the tab for the service.

So Ferris went ahead and updated the system himself -- just as he had for years at the UW -- except this time he did it from Zurich.

"He's not getting paid for it. He's just doing it because he believes in it," said Alan Borning, a UW computer-science professor who worked with Ferris on transit information research.

A slightly longer-term solution will be announced soon, perhaps in the next few days.

Metro, Sound Transit and Pierce Transit are working with the UW to fund One Bus Away for a year. Funding will enable the UW to hire someone to manage and update the service.

"We wanted to keep it going," said De Meyers, a Sound Transit information technology manager who is researching and developing rider-information systems.

It's unclear what will happen beyond the one-year contract, but Seattle-area agencies are apparently interested in a similar system being developed by a group in New York.

Called Open Trip Planner (OTP), it's an open-source project that started in 2009 and drew in part on the work that Ferris did at the UW.

The OTP software is freely shared, but several groups charge agencies to customize, host and support the system. OTP is being tested in Portland, where the TriMet transit agency helped develop the system.

In July, OTP held a user meeting in Portland attended by Meyers, another Sound Transit representative and a King County Metro manager, according to the group's attendance list.

An OTP presentation on its website also lists Sound Transit and King County as "prospective users" having "early conversations."

So is One Bus Away simply being extended until OTP is fully up and running?

"We don't know really right now," Meyers said, adding that "we're still in the assessment phase."

Meanwhile, Borning and his students may continue to use One Bus Away as a platform for research purposes.

One Bus Away users may also be asked to help out.

Borning envisions a sort of crowd-sourcing approach. People with knowledge of particular routes could become "transit ambassadors" and help run the system.

(That would be a cousin to a crowd-sourced voters guide -- at livingvotersguide.org -- that he and students are developing.)

Demand for One Bus Away continues, and it's likely to grow over the next few years as massive road projects strangle Seattle-area traffic and put more pressure on transit agencies.

The system is also uniquely accessible, enabling even basic phones to access the same information as fancy smartphones.

Crowd-sourcing may help keep the service going, Borning said.

"On the other hand," he added, "I don't have another Brian Ferris who can put in 10- or 20-hours a week."

Smith & Tinker, a once high-flying Bellevue game startup, is resurfacing this week with a new Marvel superhero game for Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

"Marvel Kapow!" features characters such as Thor, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Captain America. Players uses touchscreen gestures such as flicks to slash enemies with Wolverine's claws or shoot them with Spidey's web.

Smith & Tinker was started in 2007 by Jordan Weisman, a former Microsoft creative director. The company raised more than $29 million from a-list backers including Paul Allen and a group of venture capitalists.

The money was mostly used to develop a line of handheld game players aimed at young boys and built around a sci-fi monster game called Nanovor that launched in 2009.

That project was dropped last year after a restructuring that eventually cut the number of employees from around 55 to under 10. A recent check found Nanovor gear for 99 cents at Amazon.com, although the game's no longer supported.

Weisman remains on the board and contributes to creative work but the company's now led by Disney veteran Joe Lawandus. The company also relocated from Bellevue to space near the downtown Seattle waterfront.

"We've had a pretty interesting ride over the past few years," Lawandus said.

Lawandus said the company still has enough cash to build at least one more game based on Marvel characters. The company last year reached a licensing deal with Disney, Marvel's owner, that enables it to build casual games based on all characters in the Marvel universe.

"We're super excited about what we think tablets can bring to the mobile gaming space," he said, adding that the company is trying to reach big audiences with the brands used in its games.

"Marvel Kapow!" is available through iTunes in free versions with seven levels and advertising, or ad-free versions with 26 levels and additional characters that cost $1.99 for iPhone and iPod or $3.99 for iPads. Later the company may develop versions for Android and perhaps Windows, he said.

One of Seattle's least-known secrets is a magical app for your phone.

It can make you more efficient, reduce stress, give you more time, save you money and help the environment.

Best of all, it's free.

You don't even need an expensive smartphone or one of those wireless plans that cost as much as a car payment.

I'm talking about OneBusAway, an app that tells people when their bus is arriving. It started in 2006 as the side project of a University of Washington student and grew into a transit app platform used by software developers, researchers, transit agencies and 50,000 commuters a week.

Brian Ferris, a computer-science graduate student from the Tri-Cities, began hacking it together in 2006 after getting frustrated by the spotty arrival times of the Metro Route 44 bus he'd take sometimes when he missed the 46 commuter route from Ballard to the UW.

This was before the iPhone and the frenzy around mobile apps. Ferris thought you should be able to use a phone any time to find out when the next bus arrives.

With a collection of free software and services, he built a system that lets people with any kind of phone dial 206-456-0609, enter a stop number and get the estimated arrival time.

Ferris kept at it, often writing code on buses. He built fancier versions that blend with Google Maps and run on the iPhone, and collaborators built apps for Android devices and Windows phones.

All the versions and free tools for app developers are available via onebusaway.org.

At the end of 2008, Ferris persuaded academic advisers to let him make this his full-time project, instead of a Wi-Fi location technology he had been pursuing.

Among the research published since was a 2010 paper by Ferris, civil-engineering student Kari Edison Watkins and Professor Alan Borning that found using OneBusAway made riders feel safer and less stressed. They spend less time waiting, ride more frequently and are more satisfied with transit in general.

Ferris, 30, said they also observed that people's sense of time changes when uncertainty about their bus is removed. A 5-minute wait can seem like 10 if you don't know for sure when the bus is coming. If you know it's coming in 10 minutes, the time can seem like it's going by faster, he said.

Knowing when the bus is coming also can make people more productive, because they can do something instead of just waiting. Ferris has favorite places he visits -- coffee shops and bookstores -- when the system tells him he has extra wait time.

OneBusAway gets about 27,000 unique visitors a week who are using iPhones, 18,000 from Android devices and 18,000 from the Web.

Only about 2,000 weekly visits come from the dial-in service, which is surprising since most people don't own a smartphone. About 31 percent of the population had smartphones as of December, according to Nielsen research.

Ferris said people with basic phones probably aren't aware of the service.

The trickiest part of the dial-in system is finding the number of a bus stop.

It's a five-digit number printed at the top of posted schedules or painted on covered stops. But schedules sometimes are missing or the number is obscured.

Ferris has tried to persuade King County to change the way the number is displayed. He rode his bike to 800 stops in the south end of Seattle last summer, discreetly applying vinyl stickers displaying each stop number.

You also can enter your location or a route number by punching through the phone menu. The system remembers your number and can bookmark regular stops.

Arrival information isn't exact. Accuracy depends on information provided by the bus system.

OneBusAway works with Metro Transit, Pierce Transit, Sound Transit and Community Transit.

King County uses an older system that calculates arrival times as buses pass certain points along their route. This information is sent over bus radios to Metro.

Several earlier UW projects exposed this location information over phones and the Web, and Ferris built on top of their work.

Metro is upgrading bus radios and adding new location-tracking technology, including GPS. It intends to give developers like Ferris access to data from the new system after it's fully installed in 2012.

Transportation apps are hot nowadays.

Search giants, app developers and transit agencies are working on new tools for mapping and tracking different means of transport, drawing on government's newfound enthusiasm for sharing streams of data such as bus locations.

Metro holds workshops for app developers, about 100 of whom have asked for access to its data.

It's all part of an explosion of creativity ignited by mobile devices and fast wireless networks.

But what's refreshing about OneBusAway is that it's a pure service, created simply to make life better for commuters of all stripes. It's not trying to sell you anything, ping your friends, track your whereabouts, deduce your buying patterns or point you toward a nearby store.

It just tells you when the next bus is coming, so you don't have to stare down the road, wondering and hoping.

Bus ridership is growing. Metro provided an average 375,000 rider trips per weekday last month, up 3.5 percent from a year ago.

Meanwhile, Seattle's outrageous combination of tunnel, bridge and viaduct projects, road diets and other construction is making bus schedules elastic and tracking systems more important than ever.

The timing couldn't be worse, but now the future of OneBusAway is in limbo.

Ferris will finish his Ph.D. next month then work for Google at its Zurich, Switzerland, office, with a team that works on transit and direction services.

Local supporters are looking for ways to keep the project going. King County is talking to companies about contracts to support and extend the project.

At the UW, Borning hopes to raise enough money from transit agencies and others to hire a part-time developer to maintain the system.

"An extremely high priority is to make sure it keeps running -- we need to figure it out," Borning said.

In a way, the project will continue in Zurich, where Ferris hopes to keep working on it while building more tools to help people find and use all kinds of transportation.

"My goal," he said, "is to go to Google and do this worldwide."

Spreadsheets and word processors persuaded people to buy early PCs. Messaging and mobile browsers did the same thing for smartphones.

If you haven't bought an iPad or tablet computing device yet, maybe it's because you're not yet hooked on "Angry Birds."

The addictive slingshot game is the killer app for these touch-screen gadgets filling the gap between smartphones and portable computers.

People buy tablets thinking they'll use them instead of computers, but most don't. They end up playing "Angry Birds."

Last week a Nielsen survey said most tablet owners are using their PCs as much or more than they did before buying their tablet. Earlier, the firm said games are the most downloaded mobile application, and the best-selling app, is "Angry Birds."

The game, made by a small Finnish company called Rovio, has been downloaded more than 140 million times, and at least 40 million people per month are playing. They're collectively spending more than 200 million minutes per day tapping and flinging birds across the screen, trying to knock down a series of structures built by obnoxious pigs.

"Angry Birds" was originally designed for the iPhone in 2009, but it's best on a tablet, where you can see more of it and have more room to control the aiming.

"It's certainly the most dominant game on tablets. There's nothing close to it, I believe," said Rich Wong at Accel Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm that backed Facebook and invested in Rovio in March.

It makes you wonder if Microsoft hooked up with the right Finnish company to resuscitate its mobile business. Maybe it thought Nokia was behind the birds.

After handling more tablets than an Egyptian librarian, I've come up with a shopping guide, for those willing to spend $250 to $800 for the best "Angry Birds" experience.

Motorola Xoom, $599-$800

"Angry Birds" is prominently featured on the Xoom packaging, and the game works well on the device.

The Xoom's 10-inch screen is a good size for displaying both the launch area and target structure, even on upper levels with passages, outbuildings and stashed explosives on the far right side of the screen.

Although it's the first Android tablet with a dual-core processor, there wasn't a noticeable difference in loading. Nor did it reduce the wait time between levels.

On a bus, the Xoom's considerable heft steadies the device enough to play on bumpy roads.

The Xoom did cause one embarrassing birds incident.

During a discreet session Friday, before my deadline, the app abruptly froze. When I restarted it, it launched with the mute button off. There was no warning of this changed setting, and I was busted by the loud theme music.

Frantically tapping the screen and pressing the power button didn't stop the telltale flute. It took forever to power off, and paused to ask "are you sure?" before it stopped.

Otherwise, the Xoom scored well in the "quick exit" test. I could close the game and pretend to be working with a single click.

Barnes & Noble Nook Color, $249

After updating the Nook's operating system, you can download the original version of "Angry Birds."

The Nook market offers only the original "Angry Birds," for $2.99. Later versions and the free, ad-supported ones aren't available yet.

The Nook is the most economical option for tablet birding and doubles as a browser and electronic book with a 7-inch touch screen.

It also fits in a large pocket and weighs just less than a pound. However, this portability made it difficult to hold the device steady on the bus, where I experienced a number of misfires and errant shots.

Resolution on the Nook didn't seem as crisp as on higher-end tablets. I could see jagged edges on the blades of grass.

The Nook fared the worst in the "quick exit" test, requiring six clicks to exit in the middle of a game.

Apple iPad 2, $499-$829.

The iPad's big, bright screen is terrific for "Angry Birds" and provides plenty of room to aim.

Action is crisp and Rovio seems to put extra sparkle into the iPad version, highlighting edges of structures, for instance.

Both free and paid versions are available from iTunes, where the latest version of the game is the best-selling paid app. Two earlier versions are in the top 10.

There are a few niggles, though. The iPad version takes it upon itself to adjust the horizontal scroll mid-game, which gets annoying.

Also, every time you start a game, the iPad suggests creating or signing in to an account with Apple's "Game Center" service. There isn't an obvious way to disable this nagware, so you have to hit "cancel" every time. Then you get a message saying that "Game Center" is disabled, and you have to hit "OK" to start playing. This reminds me of Windows Vista.

It takes one click on the iPad to exit a game, return to the home screen and appear to be working.

BlackBerry PlayBook, $500 to $700

The PlayBook is a pocketable, 7-inch touch-screen device that's widely available. But "Angry Birds" is not yet available on the BlackBerry market. An emulator that will run Andoid apps is being developed.

T-Mobile G-Slate, $530.

The G-Slate has an unusual 9-inch widescreen display format that's particularly well suited for "Angry Birds."

However, the screen also partly cuts off the information displayed on the Android Market, including the "more" button listing additional version of "Angry Birds" available from the store.

Like the Xoom, the G-Slate is based on Google's new Android 3.0 software.

Currently, only free versions of "Angry Birds" are available for Android but paid versions are expected later this year.

Loading the game via T-Mobile's 4G network was significantly faster than it was on the Xoom over Verizon Wireless' 3G network, but the Xoom should be upgradeable to 4G before new "Birds" are released.

It takes a single click to exit a game and return to the home screen of the G-Slate.

Dell Streak 7, $200-$450.

The Streak has a 7-inch screen that's just a hair smaller than the Nook, but overall the device is smaller and fits easier in a pocket for portable play.

It's more like a computer than a Nook, and both its launch area and target can be displayed at a reasonable size. That makes the game more enjoyable than on a smartphone with a 3-inch or 4-inch screen.

However, the Streak resolution isn't as crisp as the larger tablets and the device would re-size the game between levels, requiring a tedious extra pinch to get the game properly aligned in the screen.

The re-sizing isn't a game-breaker, but these little design decisions lead to wasted time that adds up fast.

Seriously, how do they expect us to get any work done with these things?

How can you resist a video interview of the Utah eighth-grader who wrote Bubble Ball?

Since the game for the iPhone and iPad was released Dec. 29. it's been downloaded more than 2 million times, topping the list of free iTunes apps.

The boy, Robert Nay, has more poise than Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Take that, Tiger mom.

The first major CES 2011 announcement for a Seattle-area company is from Inrix, the Kirkland provider of traffic and vehicle information services.

Today, Inrix announced that it's going to provide real-time traffic information to "Entune," Toyota's response to the successful Ford Sync in-dash multimedia system. Entune, which is appearing in some Toyotas later this year, connects to online services via driver's mobile phones.

Inrix characterized the deal as the first of a series of collaborations with Toyota. The company is also working with Ford on its Sync product and mobile applications.

Inrix is "staffing up heavily" with about 15 open positions to support the Toyota work and a contract with an additional automaker that will be announced later this month, spokesman Jim Bak said via e-mail. That's on top of 20 employees added over the last year, which has brought the company to 70.

Here's a screenshot of Toyota's Entune menu. It has another local company's product prominently displayed - Bing Maps and Bing Mobile technology are part of Toyota's announcement today. I wonder if that will get mentioned Wednesday night during the opening keynote by Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.

The TV platform that Google is developing with Sony, Intel and Logitech will debut in the U.S. this autumn, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters at a Berlin trade fair.

Schmidt also said Google will be announcing deals with computers makers to use the company's Chrome operating system on tablet computers, according to a Reuters report.

A number of tablets have already appeared with Google's Android operating system, which was designed primarily for phones, but the Chrome OS has been mostly vaporware so far.

It's a little confusing because Chrome is also the name of Google's browser.

Samsung is mulling whether to add Google software in its TVs, according to a Bloomberg report from Seoul. Samsung is already selling TV sets with similar capabilities, including an application platform for developers.

Google is having a press event Wednesday in San Francisco but it sounds like an update to Google search technology and not the Chrome tablet announcement Schmidt previewed.

The Reuters report said Schmidt declined to comment on the music service Google's expected to announce soon. He did say he was "angry" that Google Street View camera vehicles collected private data from WiFi networks, prompting action by German regulators.

"I was very angry about that," Reuters quoted Schmidt as saying.

Here's a video of the mobile demonstration of Google Goggles for Android phones, with Google's Jason Freidenfelds showing the product at Pike Place Market.

Following the success of its iPhone application released last September, Starbucks tonight is announcing a new version for BlackBerry smartphones.

The app lets users check their Starbucks card balance, reload cards using a credit card and pay for drinks by displaying a barcode on the phone at some stores.

BlackBerry users also get a new Starbucks store mapping feature that will be added to the iPhone app soon.

Starbucks may eventually offer apps for Android and Windows phones, but BlackBerry was the most-requested platform "by far," said Chuck Davidson, category manager of Starbucks Card Innovation.

The card is having a banner year, with about a fifth of store purchases now made with one, according to Ryan Records, Starbucks Card director.

Records expects more people to use their phones to make purchases because it's fast and convenient, but he's not expecting the actual plastic cards to go away.

"We know plastic can be inconvenient sometimes," he said. "People forget their wallets, people forget their keys, but they never forget their cellphones."

The BlackBerry app is available via Starbucks.com or by texting the word "GO" to 70845. It works on the following models: 8800, 8820; Bold 9000, 9650, 9700; Curve 8300, 8310, 8320, 8330, 8350i, 8520, 8530, 8900; Storm 9530; Storm2 9550; and Tour 9630.

People with the apps on their phones can use the barcode payment system at Starbucks cafes in more than 1,000 Target stores across the country and 16 Starbucks stores,, including eight in the Seattle area that have special scanners to read the codes.

The eight Seattle stores are:

Key Tower 700 5th Ave
Columbia Center 701 Fifth Ave
First Interstate / Wells Fargo 999 Third Ave
40th Floor Columbia Tower 701 5th Ave
7th & Stewart 1700 Seventh Ave
7th & Pike 1524 7th Ave
University Village II 2650 NE 49th St.
Madison Park 4000 E. Madison Ave

Amazon.com today announced an Android version of its popular app that continues to extend its Kindle reading and book-shopping software beyond its Kindle e-reader device.

The Android Kindle app comes as Amazon and Google, backer of the open-source device platform, are increasingly competing in digital media and cloud computing services, wooing the same consumers, publishers and developers.

After you've registered with Amazon, you can use the Kindle Android app to search and browse around 620,000 books available in Kindle editions, sample the first chapter of books free, access your Kindle library online and synchronize the last page read between Kindles and other devices running the Kindle app.

The Android app uses touchscreen controls to turn pages with taps on the side of the screen or flicks.

Still to come, though, is the ability to purchase Kindle books from within the Android app and full text search.

Also not there yet apparently are multimedia features that Amazon.com on Sunday added to its iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch applications.

Those Kindle apps can now play digital books with embedded audio and video clips, such as "Bird Songs" and a special version of Rick Steves' "London by Rick Steves" that includes Steves narrating walking tours.

Watching his 3 year-old daughter nearly get run over by a texting driver inspired a Seattle landscape contractor to jump into the phone application business.

Erik Wood, 43, was walking home from Queen Anne's Coe Elementary with his daughter last fall when a woman in a black Volkswagen shot out of an alley while texting with both hands, passing within a few feet of the girl.

The driver drove on without ever seeing the pedestrians, but Wood was so shook up he started researching safety issues around texting drivers. Then he decided to create an application that could help.

"People live in this false reality that 'I can get away with texting and driving,' " he said. "The problem is they don't know what they're missing, they don't get the wake-up call until it's a T-bone, violent crash."

He and his wife tapped their children's college fund, withdrawing more than the cost of a new truck, and spent seven months working with software developers to produce an application called Otter that was released on the Android phone platform April 5.

"I think we realized that we had survived our first nearly fatal text-and-drive encounter but with two little girls growing up, the statistics proved this wouldn't be our last brush with this," he said. "That's what inspired us to do something about it.''

The Otter application interrupts text message notifications when the phone's GPS radio detects the device is moving at least 10 miles per hour. It doesn't block the messages outright, but sends an automatic reply to the sender, saying,"Otter says BTH (Break the Habit)."

Otter -- which stands for one touch text response -- also has parental controls so parents can activate it on their children's phones.

Wood is joining a growing number of companies producing applications and other systems to block or prevent texting while driving. He said Otter has a cost advantage because it doesn't carry recurring monthly fees like some competing applications. It's a one-time $3.99 download from the Android Market.

Versions for the Windows and BlackBerry phone platforms should be done in three to six months. Wood would like to do an iPhone version but its new software apparently won't provide access he needs to the phones' notifications or SMS services.

It's a moneymaking venture, but Wood said he had to give it a try no matter what.

"You know when you come to those forks in the road where you don't have any other choice?" he said. "This was definitely one of those."