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Sales of Android phones have risen by more than 300% from the beginning of 2010, with one in 10 contract handsets sold in the UK now running Google’s mobile operating system.

Android’s share of the UK mobile contract market grew by 10.2 percentage points from the first quarter of 2010 to the second quarter, from 3% to 13.2%, new figures from retail watcher GfK show.

From the beginning of 2010, most of the UK’s major mobile operators have started selling a number of hotly-anticipated mobile devices running Google’s Linux-based software. The HTC Desire and HTC Legend are among other devices lauded by critics.

Just last week, Samsung launched a direct marketing challenge to the Apple iPhone with its Android-powered Galaxy S device.

Many mobile operators were unable to keep up with demand for the HTC Desire when it launched in the UK in April this year. HTC, the Taiwanese manufacturer of many devices running Android, posted a 41% global sales increase for the first six months of 2010, with figures from April, May and June reflecting record sales, according to the company.

In the same period, mobile devices running “advanced” operating systems – defined as those able to run independent compatible applications – grew in the contract market from 55% to 66.7%. Figures available from June show mobiles with advanced operating systems now representing 73.5% of the contract market.

“The figures suggest an increasing number of consumers are now asking for Android handsets by name,” said GfK analyst Megan Baldock. “Operating systems are no longer simply a by-product but a key selling point in their own right.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

This article was written by Richard Lea, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 23rd July 2010 09.30 UTC

Publishers came face to face with their own vision of apocalypse yesterday, as Andrew Wylie announced that he and his authors would be cutting publishing houses out of the future and teaming up with Amazon to sell their own electronic editions.

Grinning down from the saddle beside him in the first wave of horsemen is a fearsome collection of riders, including Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and John Updike. “As the market for ebooks grows, it will be important for readers to have access in ebook format to the best contemporary literature the world has to offer,” the agent popularly known as “the Jackal” said, cackling diabolically (I imagine). “This publishing programme is designed to address that need, and to help ebook readers build a digital library of classic contemporary literature.”

Odyssey Editions may be launching with just 20 titles, but publishers are hitting back as if their eternal souls depended on it, and you can see why. Slice off the biggest names, the most valuable backlist items from any publisher’s list and the business model is up in flames.

This may be nothing but an Armageddon-style negotiating ploy, as Wylie delivers on a warning he gave publishers late last year when Random House claimed existing contracts already gave them control over authors’ electronic rights. But if Wylie and his lawyers can make this a success – and you only need to glance at his client list to imagine how – then others are sure to follow. Random House, which publishes Roth, Rushdie and Amis in the UK, has written to Amazon already “disputing their rights to legally sell these titles”. It declared Wylie a “direct competitor” and ruled out “entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved”.

It’s the latest battle in a multi-dimensional war over the future of literature as authors, agents and publishers face a horde of technology companies, retailers and libraries, not to mention the pirates, with constantly shifting alliances. As electronic reading devices – the Kindles, the Readers, the iPads, your phone – finally begin to take off, all the old certainties are in flux. Do authors need publishers to take on the might of the retailers, or are publishers part of the problem? Should writers keep their copyrights safely under lock and key, or will that rob them of the chance to take wing?

Once upon a time publishers were the only ones who could find authors, edit manuscripts, print books and distribute them, but new technology from desktop computers to the internet has thrown the doors wide open. As marketing departments have gained the ascendancy over editorial, agents have moved centre stage, filtering submissions and polishing manuscripts. With the messy business of ink and trees and Transit vans receding, Wylie’s latest move is simply the logical next step. None of this will worry those publishers who have made a business out of finding the voices others haven’t spotted, but in the week when Amazon claimed that ebook sales passed those of hardbacks the questions are unavoidable: who needs big publishers? Are the interests of writers and readers best served by big publishers, or the Jackal?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

This article was written by Johnny Dee, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 3rd July 2010 08.42 UTC

The benefits of Twitter are legion. You can tell random strangers that you’ve just purchased a new phone or keep your friends abreast of your latest bowel movements. Alternatively users can join forces with stand-up comedians in exciting witch hunts against homophobic columnists. Celebrities meanwhile can use the service to reveal how normal they are by telling us they’ve just purchased some hummus. From a real shop.

Not that any of this was relevant to a 28-year-old comedy writer from San Diego called Justin Halpern who, after being dumped by his girlfriend several years ago, had to face the hipster lifestyle catastrophe of returning home to live with his parents.

The arrangement did have one particular upside. It allowed him to spend more time with his then 73-year-old father, Sam, a man who – not always deliberately – happened to be one of the funniest and simultaneously rudest men ever. Justin didn’t realise his dad was hilarious when he was a kid; his father’s preference to wander around the house naked and use phrases before dinner such as “let’s just shut the fuck up and eat” were the source of embarrassment rather than fun. But then as a teenager he began writing down his father’s quips, foul-mouthed pearls of wisdom and blunt advice in notebooks.

Years later, returning home as an adult, he found a whole new use for the 140 characters or less on Twitter and began posting his father’s philosophies and TV-watching asides for the amusement of family and friends.

Going from zero to a million followers in nine months, Shit My Dad Says become the first viral Twitter success story. The site has spawned a book and a sitcom which begins airing in the US this autumn and stars Star Trek legend William Shatner as the cantankerous lead. The book shows Justin inherited his father’s comedy genes and, as well as being very funny, also paints a great story of regular American family life – albeit with added swearing and an obsession with bowel movements. Halpern Sr’s quotes, though, remain the main attraction. Here, are some of our favourites; and feel free to add any Shit Your Dad Says below …

PARENTING “A parent’s only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed.”

NATURE “Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor.”

CHRISTMAS “Everybody’s broke, so here’s the rule for Christmas this year; if you still shit your pants, you get a present. Otherwise tough shit.”

TECHNOLOGY “Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

KIDS’ HAIR “Does anyone your age know how to comb their fucking hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their head and started fucking.”

VOICEMAIL “Why would i want to check a voicemail on my cell phone? People want to talk to me, call again. If i want to talk to you, I’ll answer.”

MUSIC “What are you listening to?…I know who Hall & Oates are goddammit. It’s the moustache guy and the gay man.”

EVIL “The worst thing you can be is a liar … OK fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then, number two is liar. Nazi 1, Liar 2″

THE X FILES “So, the woman and the dopey-looking guy screw, and then look for aliens – or they just screw and sometimes aliens follow them?”

FEAR “When its asshole-tightening time, that’s when you see what people are made of. or at least what their asshole is made of.”

BULLIES “You’re gonna run into jerk offs. But remember, it’s not the size of the asshole you worry about, it’s how much shit comes out of it.”

WATER SLIDES “You go on ahead. I’d rather not be shot out of a tube into a pool filled with a bunch of nine-year-olds’ urine.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010