Google and Clever Sense have teamed up to release a new Android app named Alfred. Alfred makes recommendations to users based on their likes and dislikes, and allows owners to discover new places by refining searches for cuisine type, price range, dietary restrictions and distance.

The free app is currently available in the Android Market. The description makes it sound like Alfred is only good for finding restaurants, but if you ever used Siri you know she can't do much more. Personal robot assistants are basically just a fancy, and sometimes annoying, way to search the internet.

Atom processors from chip maker Intel are coming to Android smartphones in the first half of 2012 thanks to a new partnership between Intel and Google. Intel is looking for a fast track into the growing mobile device market as traditional computer sales slip in North America and Europe.

The deal aims to optimize Android for Atom x86 processors and speed up development and release of Intel-based devices running Android. To date, Google and other Android smartphone manufacturers have favored the power sipping ARM-licensed chips from Samsung and Texas Instruments.

Apple announced today that smartphone owners with Android 2.2 or higher will be seeing a new Android Market in the upcoming weeks. The updated app will allow Android users to instantly watch thousands of movies for $1.99. You can watch the movies from anywhere (web, phone or tablet) or save them to watch later without an internet connection.

When Android phones were in their infancy, one of Apple's prominent marketing campaigns highlighted the dearth of Android Apps when compared to the number available for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. In the years that have passed, Apple has backed off this claim as the number of Android phones and Android apps grow at a consistently increasing rate. In an announcement yesterday, Google revealed that over 3 billion Android apps have been installed to date.

3 billion is an impressive number, especially when you consider the fact that this tally was only 2 billion a mere two months ago. A 50 percent increase in app installations in the course of two months marks a considerable spike in the historical rate of Android App deployment.

PushLife has joined Google's engineering team in Canada after a $25 million acquisition of the startup was just announced this weekend. The company was started in 2008, focusing on streaming media and providing software similar to Apple's iTunes for Android and RIM devices.

Users could even bring content from their iTunes library onto non-Apple devices, and stream music, video and other media from the cloud. The purchase has resulted in lots of speculation over a possible Google Music service in the works.

Perhaps you've already been using Google Latitude to track yourself and your friends on the Latitude web site. If you haven't, the latest upgrade to Google Maps 5.3 might get you started. Google announced yesterday on their mobile blog the release of Google Maps 5.3 for Android, which brings a Google Location history dashboard to your phone. You can now view trends in your location history on right on your phone instead of only on the Google Latitude web site.

In order to use the new dashboard, you'll need to have location history tracking enabled in Google Latitude and update the version of Google Maps currently on your Android phone to 5.3. Once enabled, you can then use the dashboard to tag locations, check in at those locations and view information on your location trends.

In a blog post today by Android development team member Eric Chu, Google officially announced the launch of in-app purchasing for Android applications. In-app purchases allows users to make purchases from within an application such as app upgrades or virtual app "goods". This ability gives Android app developers an additional method of monetizing their apps.

Developers won't have to worry about handling any financial data, or interacting with financial institutions, as all of the purchasing functionality is handled by Google. In addition, in-app purchases will be handled by the same interface used to purchase apps from the Android Market, providing a consistent user experience to customers.

Sprint recently outed the Nexus S 4G, which will be available to Sprint customers this Spring. Though there's no exact release date, with Spring right around the corner, eager Sprint customers shouldn't have to wait long. This new incarnation of the Nexus S will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread (vanilla). The subsidized price (with 2 year contract) will be $199.

The Nexus S was originally released in GSM flavor in December of last year, but didn't support 4G speeds (no support for T-Mobile's HSPA+ network). While 4G support is new to this version of the Nexus S, other important specs are shared with its GSM counterpart. Both models offer a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera, a VGA front-facing camera, a 1Ghz processor and 16GB of storage.

Android and iPhone users alike can now take advantage of Google's preview of search results. The feature has been added for mobile users with Android 2.2 or later. Instead of clicking links a simple tap on the magnifying glass icon shows an image of the web page result.

Images of search result websites can then be browsed before visiting. The change will appear automatically for mobile users with no software installation or settings modifications. iOS devices running iOS 4.0 or later will also see the improvements.

Android security has come to the forefront as malicious apps were recently found on the Android Market. Google is on the case, and has promptly removed the offending apps as announced in the Google Mobile Blog. Reports have indicated that 58 infected apps have been removed in the latest action by Google.

Over 260,000 devices installed the apps before they were discovered and removed. For these users, a remote kill switch will be activated by Google to remove the malicious apps and automatically undo the exploit on their devices.