If we were to take everything the rumormill said as gospel, we’d tell you that the Motorola Cliq XT launched in all of its Android glory on March 10th. Given that it’s now nearly a week later and the Cliq XT has yet to hit the shelves, we’d say that the rumormill is a dirty, dirty liar. Or, you know, something changed at the last minute.

Either way, now there’s a new, improved rumor to bank on! This rumor is stronger. This rumor is faster. Oh, and yeah, this rumor is most likely correct and includes updated pricing information.

Our friends over at TmoNews managed to dig up this T-Mobile intranet screencap which shows off just about everything any would-be Cliq XT owner wants to know. The price? $99 bucks on a 2-year contract, $199 if you opt for 1-year instead. The launch date? March 17th — otherwise referred to by the present time cool kids as “tomorrow”.

Come, friends! Circle ’round and let me tell you a tale of the finest fake in all the lands. Is your standard, completely not-shady iPhone too thick and legitimate for you? 12.3mm thick? That’s like a loaf of bread! What you need, friend, is the iPhone Air. Not only have they managed to completely rip off everything from the body design to the user interface (presumably poorly), but they’ve also stuffed it all into a package just 8.5mm thick!

Trademark infringement? Pah! This is China, friend! Plus, it’s got WiFi! And Edge! App Store? What’s an App Store? This has all the apps you’ll ever need. Like a random browser claiming to be Internet Explorer.

And how much will this plunge into crazytown set you back? For you, friend, just 880 Chinese Yuan — or roughly 117 dollars. Where are you going, friend? Friend?

[m8Cool via GizChina]

A new challenger has appeared! The Nexus One may not have sold all that well, but it’s still the beastiest Android handset available on US carriers. Speaking of US carriers, add one more to the Nexus One’s supported list.

Since day 1, the T-Mobile version of the Nexus One has worked with AT&T — as long as you didn’t mind that it couldn’t hop on AT&T’s 3G network. Today, with fanfare limited to a post on Google’s Nexus One blog, Google has released a version of the handset jam-packed with AT&T 3G-friendly radio.

This was a bit out of the blue for everyone – we expected to see it eventually after the AT&T’d-out Nexus One cleared the FCC, but then Google made no mention of it whilst heralding that the Verizon Nexus One was “Coming Soon!”. It may be a surprise, but it’s a very much welcome surprise.

Alas, the handset is only being sold unlocked, sans contract. There’s currently no way to get it subsidized with an AT&T discount, implying that AT&T wasn’t interested in offering the phone officially. I wonder why.

[Thanks Martin]

The First Lady has set an ambitious goal for all of us -- to solve the challenge of childhood obesity in this Nation within a generation. We’ve got a lot of work to do!

That’s why the President asked me to chair a new interagency Childhood Obesity Task Force. The task force is developing an action plan for how federal, state, and local governments, along with the private and nonprofit sectors, can come together and take specific steps to achieve this goal. (You can see the full Presidential Memorandum creating the Task Force and requesting the action plan within 90 days here.)

We want the best ideas from across the country -- not just from researchers, but from parents and teachers and everyone with a stake in our children’s future. So we’ve set up a way for you to send in your thoughts. You can view our "Request for Information” and see how to submit your suggestions here. You don’t have to answer all of the questions; whatever ideas you have are welcome. The deadline for replying is March 26.

We need as many hands on deck as possible to meet the challenge before us, so we hope you join us by sending in your ideas and getting involved in Let’s Move! in your own community.

Melody Barnes is Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy

Last summer, I had the honor of travelling with the President his family to Yellowstone National Park.  The Obama family followed a long tradition of American Presidents visiting our nation National Parks including President’s Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton.

The National Park system is a fundamentally American and democratic idea: protecting our nation’s finest landscapes, preserving our history and culture, and providing places of recreation and respite for all Americans to enjoy.  As Secretary of the Interior, I’m proud to continue this tradition of investing in and protecting these places that define us as a nation.

I hope you’ll enjoy this never before seen footage of the first family’s trip to Yellowstone last summer -- or an extended version here -- and we look forward to seeing you at one of our National Parks this summer!

Ken Salazar in Secretary of the Interior

At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it’s no wonder that the size of the Android Market is quickly increasing in its slipstream.

While Google doesn’t publicly show how many applications there are in Android Market, a Google representative this morning informed me that the application store now serves approximately 30,000 free and paid apps in total.

The application store for Android devices supposedly hit the 10,000 apps milestone in September 2009 according to third-party developer AndroLib, who later also claimed that number doubled in just over 3 months.

Google at the time matched these claimed stats against its own count, and said there were in reality some 16,000 apps in Android Market in December 2009. Yesterday, I asked Google for an update to those internal stats after I noticed AndroLib currently pegs the number of apps at nearly 35,000, and this morning the company got back to me saying there are now officially 30,000 apps in the Android Market. In other words, Google says the number grew from 16k to 30k apps in exactly three months.

The company declines to detail what percentage of apps in Android Market are paid versus free, but for what it’s worth, AndroLib says the ratio is about 39% paid vs. 61% free of charge.

Just for comparison’ sake: Apple counted over 140,000 apps in the App Store in January 2010, so it’s safe to assume there should be about 5 times as many apps for the iPhone and iPod touch as there are for Android devices right about now.

Research agency research2guidance recently released a report forecasting that the total app download market could grow to a whopping $15 billion by 2013.

“After over a year of debate, the final package is only days away from getting the up-or-down vote Americans deserve” – so said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius after another step forward in the House Budget Committee yesterday.   As we move closer to reform, though, we want to make sure you have every opportunity to get your questions answered on what it would mean for you and your family. Of course you can find a lot of those answers in our section of WhiteHouse.gov dedicated to the President’s proposal, but there’s no better person to go deeper into the issues than Secretary Sebelius, so we hope you’ll join us tomorrow at 5:15PM EST for another online video chat where she’ll take your questions live.  In addition, we’ll be trying something new by conducting the chat through Ustream, which also allows you to sign into the chat via not only Facebook, but Twitter, MySpace, and even AOL Instant Messenger.

Watch the discussion live through WhiteHouse.gov/live Join the discussion at Ustream using your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or AIM account

Download: Rectangular (630px by 303px) | Square (389px by 354px)

If you’re an American under the age of 65, there’s roughly a 50/50 chance that you will find yourself without coverage at some point in the next decade.[Source]

President Obama first highlighted this staggering figure in a weekly address from this past September and detailed how, in our broken health care system, losing insurance can happen to anyone.  At yesterday’s rally, the President reminded us of just how fragile the status quo really is:

Part of what makes this issue difficult is most of us do have health insurance, we still do.  And so -- and so we kind of feel like, well, I don’t know, it’s kind of working for me; I’m not worrying too much.  But what we have to understand is that what’s happened to Natoma, there but for the grace of God go any one of us.  Anybody here, if you lost your job right now and after the COBRA ran out …

So let’s just think about -- think about if you lost your job right now.  How many people here might have had a preexisting condition that would mean it’d be very hard to get health insurance on the individual market?  Think about if you wanted to change jobs.  Think about if you wanted to start your own business but you suddenly had to give up your health insurance on your job.  Think about what happens if a child of yours, heaven forbid, got diagnosed with something that made it hard for them to insure.

For so many people, it may not be a problem right now but it’s going to be a problem later, at any point.  And even if you’ve got good health insurance, what’s happening to your premiums?  What’s happening to your co-payments?  What’s happening to your deductible?  They’re all going up.  That’s money straight out of your pocket.

So the bottom line is this:  The status quo on health care is simply unsustainable. We can’t have -- we can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.

Today’s number – 50/50 – is the latest in our ‘Health Reform by the Numbers’ series, an online campaign to raise awareness about how we just can’t wait any longer for health insurance reform. You can follow the campaign on Whitehouse.gov and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.

To help spread the word, share this blog post with your family, friends and online networks using the ‘Share/Bookmark’ feature below.

Previous Numbers:

1 41 625 8 1115

Super sleuths at MS Mobiles (Motto: “Our small phone-shaped favicon is so outdated it’s popular again”) is accusing Microsoft of wholesale theft and battery in their new WinPho UI. KLM’s inflight whatsitcalled looks just like Microsoft’s whatsitcalled and the big blue buttons appear on KLMs entertainment whatchamacallit when you fly on their big, beautiful planes. Is it borrowing or is it theft?

Considering that Microsoft probably has the cash to buy KLM right now, I’m not too worried that this will go to lawsuit. But come on, guys. You can’t create something novel?

The Softs of Micro note that their new UI was inspired by “airports.” MSI Mobile suggests that they were really thinking of one particular airline.

Mobile app analytics company Flurry estimates that while Apple sold 1 million iPhone devices in its first 74 days of availability on the market, the Motorola Droid actually shipped more devices during that timespan. Sales of Google’s Nexus One, by comparison, kinda stunk: the company only sold an estimated 135k phones in 74 days.

Flurry reaches its conclusions through applications using its solution for analytics reporting. Because applications embedded with Flurry are said to have been downloaded to over 80% of all iPhone OS and Android devices, the company claims it can make reliable estimates about total handset sales.

Check out Flurry’s blog post for possible reasons why the Motorola Droid appears to have outsold the Apple iPhone in terms of numbers of devices shipped in the first 74 days on the market.

The respective launch dates of the 3 devices were: iPhone, June 29, 2007; Droid, November 5, 2009; and, Nexus One, January 5, 2010. Note that this means the Nexus One still has a few days left to reach 74 days, but it’s safe to say Google won’t be selling almost a million devices by the end of this week.

Earlier this year, Flurry estimated both first week and first month sales of Nexus One sales compared to Motorola Droid and the first-gen iPhone. They paled in comparison then, and they do now.

Here’s what Flurry has to say about the limited success of the Nexus One:

As Google and Apple continue to battle for the mobile marketplace, Google Nexus One may go down as a grand, failed experiment or one that ultimately helped Google learn something that will prove important in years to come. Apple’s more vertically integrated strategy vs. Google’s more open Android platform approach offer strengths and weaknesses that remind us of PC vs. Mac from the 1980’s.

A key difference this time around is that Apple is enjoying much more 3rd party developer support, whose innovative applications push the limits of what the hardware can do. Ultimately, however, developers support hardware with the largest installed base first. For Android to make progress faster, from a sales perspective, it needs more Droids and fewer Nexus Ones going forward.

Ouch.