Shopper, Google’s barcode scanning, cover recognizing, voice searching application has gotten an update over the weekend. If you don’t know, Shopper can recognize book and other media just by “scanning” the cover art. It can also find items by scanning their barcode or you can search for them by just speaking. But enough about what it does, what did the update do?

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Do you ever wish you could be Jacques Cousteau, but you’re terrified of water? Well thanks to the latest updated from Google Earth, you’ll be exploring the ocean floor in no time.:

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Michael Gartenberg, analyst for Altimeter Group, was quite alarmed Thursday night. He opened up the Android Market, typed in “Jewish”, and was greeted by some pro-Hitler themes. After he sent Google a formal protest, the apps were almost immediately pulled. More so than the apps themselves, Gartenberg stated on his Twitter feed that he “was more disturbed at how it came up in search results. Clearly designed to offend”.
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Oracle Corp. said Thursday that it will be suing Google claiming that their Android OS infringed on intellectual property of Oracles Java Platform.

Google is no stranger to lawsuits. The most recent lawsuit being Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube/Google claiming YouTube infringed on its copyrights and knowingly allowed offending content to remain on its site. A federal judge sided and ruled in favor with YouTube. Viacom has filed an appeal.

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Today at the Google Mobile Event, Google announced the release of a new feature for Android, dubbed Voice Action. This new feature is a way for us to be able to speak to our Android devices to accomplish tasks. Commands include:

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Gesture search, an app from Google that allows the user to search by writing characters on your Android device’s screen, has gone through an update that now utilizes a new gesture. Basically, it’s what Google has dubbed the “double flip”, which simply entails flipping the phone away from you and then back towards you. This new gesture will open up the gesture search app from any place in the phone.

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The new version of Google Voice has arrived today. Previously, the Google Voice were set up so that the users had to make a request to the GV server every single time they wanted to make an outbound call, but all of that has changed. Due to Direct Access Numbers, Google has managed to speed up the whole process, which should mean using the service on your device will be easier than ever before.

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Google’s inveterate tinkerers continue to have their way, with another Googlelabs project breaking cover. Google Open Spot is billed as a way to alert other Android users to available parking spaces nearby, relying on helpful tagging of free spots which show up on a GPS-led map.

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Google has unveiled App Inventor, a straightforward way for would-be developers who lack programming skills to create software that will run on Android smartphones. Similar to the create-your-own-game software of many years ago, App Inventor uses preset functionality blocks that together represent pretty much everything that an Android phone is capable of; by shuffling those blocks around and setting some basic parameters you should be able to create your own app.

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More Froya news keeps pouring out, for a while we’ve known that the Android 2.2 will be coming to Droid next month, but it looks like it might be coming a tad earlier than we had expected, at least for some lucky owners. This is only a rumor at the moment, but with more of a circulation now, it seems far more like reality than fiction. It turns out Google is handing out Froyo to a certain set of Droid users over the air.

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