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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I’ve long wondered when someone would start leveraging existing LBS apps as a platform to add layers of functionality on top of, and it looks like a team at Jumpfox — a mobile app development firm — has done just that.

They’ve created a new startup and mobile app called “TappLocal,” which aims to emulate the rewards and location-based offers being integrated in existing LBS apps like Foursquare and Yelp, but do so independently to create a so-called “location-based ad-network” strictly for highly relevant LBS offers.  The tech is then offered up to partner LBS apps for integration.

Here’s how it works: TappLocal uses their backend to create a geofence around certain partner venues.  When a user crosses that boundary and happens to be using one of the partner apps, a deal indicator will pop-up in real-time.  Clicking this area opens a larger area explaining exactly what the deal is.  Simply click one more time to verify you wish to use the deal, show it to the store that it’s valid at, and the offer is validated and redeemed on-the-spot.

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On the heels of announcing a major mobile push with “Places,” Facebook announced today usage numbers for its various mobile apps — namely iOS, Android and Blackberry.

A big reason Facebook Places was such a big deal in the LBS world was Facebook’s massive installed mobile user base.  To give a glimpse of that user base, Facebook indicates there are nearly 105 million active monthly iPhone users.  This is truly impressive given the fact that Apple themselves said only a few months ago that they were approaching 100 million total iOS users.  If this is true, it could indicate nearly every iPhone user is using the Facebook app, though that’s doubtful and some obvious variables exist in the figures.

While its iOS app is by far the most widely used, BlackBerry comes in second with 60M total active users using the Facebook application, which is impressive as well.  On the Android front, Facebook indicates an installed user base of roughly 12 million, which seems low, but remember the Facebook app for Android has always left a lot to be desired when compared to its iOS brethren.  With these figures, it’s no wonder why Places is only natively available in the iPhone app, though the others are coming.

Android seems to be in the spotlight more than ever these days, surpassing Apple in activations, mobile Web browsing and other important categories.  According to new data from Chitika, Android now beats the iPhone on yet another vital front — mobile advertising CTR.

In a break down of iOS vs. Android mobile-ad click rates provided by Chitika, Android users clicked on ads 81% more frequently than iPhone users, signaling an important milestone as Google and Apple continue to battle on the mobile advertising front.  Granted this is just one of many mobile ad-networks (Chitika), but it’s interesting nonetheless.

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According to new data out from mobile analytics firm Bango, Android continues its surge in mobile Web browsing market share at the expense of Apple, who’s seen its share decrease by over 16 percent between the first and second quarters of 2010.

Apple showed the slowest quarterly volume growth of just 13 percent, while the volume of mobile web browsing from Android phones in the US grew by 400 percent for the same period.  On the device front, HTC and Sony Ericsson showed the largest volume growth of mobile web visits in the US with an increase of 162 percent and 148 percent respectively.  This represented a growth in market share between quarters of 94 percent and 84 percent.

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