If the act of whipping out your cell phone to checkin on Foursquare has gotten to be too much of a hassle, Vlingo has you covered.  The voice-triggered app for Android now allows complete voice-based control over Foursquare, including checkins, shout-outs and other socially-related voice-commands.

Using just your voice, the app allows you to update your location status on Foursquare by saying something like “check into Starbucks,” or locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?”  In addition, the app also lets users update their status on Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare at the same time by saying “social update” and saying the message.  Pretty cool.

Available only for Android devices sporting 2.0 or higher at the moment, Vlingo plans to add the functionality to its other apps in the near future.  In addition to the new social functionality, Vlingo still offers users the ability to do a number of other voice-based tasks including sending text and email messages, searching the web, navigating Google maps and more.

Distimo, a startup focused on providing app store analytics, has published its latest report detailing the mobile app ecosystem across the Apple App Store for iPad and iPhone, BlackBerry’s App World, the Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog and the Windows Marketplace for Mobile for July 2010 in the United States.

Similar to previous reports, Distimo primarily looked at pricing characteristics across all major app stores to determine the proportion of free vs. paid apps and the average cost of which, which continue to rise.  The Android Market continues to have the largest share of free apps compared to the others, with 60% of the total, compared to just 29% for Apple’s App Store for iPhone and 26% for the iPad App Store.  Android has more than double the amount of free apps than any of the other six App Stores in the report.

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The writing is clearly on the wall for Apple. Soon, it’s iPad will not be the lone warrior on the battlefield of tablet computers. And although the iPad may remain the dominant force in the industry, it will have its fair share of pretenders, wannabes, and perhaps even legitimate contenders to the tablet crown.

This week, numerous reports have surfaced about forthcoming iPad competitors that consumers will soon encounter in the marketplace. Case in pont: KT, South Korea’s largest fixed-line operator and the country’s second-largest mobile carrier by revenue, is moving forward with a little something called the “Identity Tab” tablet PC.

The Identity Tab, which will be released in early September, sports a 7-inch screen, is powered by Android, includes a one-gigahertz CPU, 8GB of memory and a 3-megapixel camera. Apps will be available from KT’s Olleh Market and Google’s Android Market.

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The Android Market has been known to have a few issues from a developer’s point-of-view, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t proven successful as a revenue generator.

Arron La, developer of the Android app “Advanced Task Manager,” wrote a blog post recently outlining the revenue he’s earned during the latter half of 2009 and 2010 up to this point.  According to him, developing for Android has more than grown into a viable revenue stream.

La reports that the paid version of “Advanced Task Manager” generated $18,060 in 2009 and $30,400 so far in 2010.  Since November 2009, AdMob revenues in the free version generated $28,640 as of August.  In total that’s a little over $77,000 in revenue from just one app.

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I use PayPal a lot.  In recent years it’s become a primary form of payment for me both on and offline, but one place I can’t use PayPal so easily is to purchase apps on my Android device.  That may soon change, as it’s been rumored that PayPal and Google are in talks over using the now-ubiquitous payment technology in the Android Market.

Bloomberg is reporting that people familiar to the matter say PayPal is close to including its payment service within the Android software, making it easier for users to purchase apps and providing app developers another way of getting paid.  It may also help Google’s fight with Apple over their respective app-store ecosystems.  Android devices are already outselling iPhones, but Apple still dominates the app space.

Apple’s prime advantage is that iTunes users can buy apps with one touch because their payment information is already stored.  Google offers similar features through its Checkout service, though it isn’t as popular as iTunes or PayPal, creating hassles for new users.  By adopting PayPal, which has 87 million active accounts, Google may attract more paying customers.  In addition, PayPal has put heavy emphasis on mobile as of late, and that innovation could play well for the future of the Android Market.

A Chinese mobile security solutions provider warned today that the proliferation of apps now available in the Android Market means that increasingly more malicious software–viruses, spyware, malware, and the like–now threaten Android phones.

NetQin Mobile said in July that it found the program  called “Carrot App,” a tip calculator, will read all of a phone’s SMS messages and send them hourly to a designated email address; another version of the app can also “overhear” voice conversations on the phone. Today the company noted the 11-fold growth in the number of apps made available in in July 2010: 18,600 as opposed to the 1,669 apps in July 2009. Considering that one in five apps are able to access personal information, that’s a lot of potential for attacks against Android phones, NetQin said.

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ABI Research today published a new five-year forecast for the mobile apps space, predicting a continued surge in the number of apps available, with Apple’s App Store predicted to remain the “healthiest app economy in terms of downloads” for the foreseeable future.

ABI expects 2010 to be the biggest year for mobile application downloads going forward, with just under 6 billion forecast to be downloaded, up from an estimated 2.4 billion in 2009.  Revenues from mobile app sales, however, are expected to decline by 2012, as competition has led to downward pressure on application prices; and a greater proportion of “must-have” applications will begin to have free or advertising-supported substitutes.

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