Week in review: Droid vs Eris, Google acquires Admob

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

DroidWhich phone should you buy: Droid or Eris? Go with the Droid! — “Like many phone buying Americans, my budget is tighter than the average consumer’s pants after Thanksgiving dinner. With two Droids to choose from, I had a bit of a mental tug-of-war as to which one to buy.”

YouTube to support 1080p high-definition video; mobile video uploads up 2,000% this year — “YouTube is going to roll out 1080p high-definition video later this week, as the video portal steps up its quality to compete with other sites.”

Microsoft boots lots of Xbox 360 “modders” from Xbox Live — “Microsoft has dropped what it fondly calls the ‘banhammer’ on a bunch of Xbox 360 gamers by banning them from playing multiplayer games on the Xbox Live online gaming service.”

Intel introduces a digital device that reads aloud to the blind — “Ben Foss grew up with dyslexia, a learning disability so severe that his mother had to read books to him throughout his school years, all the way through college. Now 36, he is spearheading the launch of a remarkable device from Intel that can read electronic books aloud to the blind or visually impaired.”

4 MORE ways to get automatically rejected by an angel investor — “As someone who has both sought venture capital and distributed it, I’m lucky to have a pretty unique perspective on what works and doesn’t work.”

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

admob_logoGoogle to buy mobile advertising network AdMob for $750 million — “Google said it will buy mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock today, letting the search giant further muscle its way into mobile advertising and extend the dominance it has built on the web in search-based advertising.”

It’s a pretty good day — and year — for Accel Partners — “It’s weird how good news for VCs seems to have come in pairs.”

On playing the role of a terrorist in Modern Warfare 2 video game — “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 may be the best-selling video game in history, but it will also go down as one of the most controversial because of a scene in which players can participate as terrorists in a civilian massacre.”

Renewable energy policy to result in 1.9M jobs, study says — “The Obama administration’s progressive support for renewable energy will result in about 1.9 million green collar jobs, according to a new report published by three U.S. universities.”

Google’s Chrome OS rumored to launch next week — “Google’s browser-based operating system will be released to the public ‘within a week,’ claims TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington, who says he has inside sources.”

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Droid may get better in web page rendering, but not before a new software push is released.

    I suspect Dorid will start using some of the magic in Google Chrome browser 4.0, which was just released this week, and its awesomely fast on Linux and Windows. But this will take a while to get pushed to these phones.

    I wonder how much of this due to the network and how much is due to the render engine?

    It seems the network would have a big effect if Deiter had a good ATT connection.
  • Android is being updated quickly and well.

    I'm not yet convinced the smartphone user experience has matured enough to handle sophisticated e-commerce transactions outside of the Appstore/Android Market (when was the last time you bought something from Amazon through your iPhone/Droid?). Until then advertisers will have a very difficult time converting smartphone visitors.
  • Hi guy's,
    Thanks For sharing this review.its awesomely fast on Linux and Windows. But this will take a while to get pushed to these phones.
  • Thanks for the informative review, just to follow up on one of the topics you discussed, we recently posted a post about the google admob story giving our take on the story fell free to check it out: http://tinyurl.com/yzzqdxx

    Zack