Do we have any time piece fanatics here? If you are one, then we’ll assume you have heard of TAG Heuer, a high end Swiss watch maker who’s pieces are quite extraordinary and pricey. TAG is now introducing the Link, which is a smartphone running Android 2.2, has a variety of skins such as alligator hide for an exterior, and even Gorilla Glass.

The phone has a listing of $5,000 US Dollars, and TAG mentions they do plan on updating the OS in the future to hopefully Android 2.3. Let us proceed to wipe the sweat from our brows, because the phone itself, has actually been built like a tank. It is waterproof, air sealed tight, and is completely shock resistant (Samsung take notes). 

Two weeks ago to the day, Google introduced a new mobile site that made it easier for users to search for nearby places with shortcuts, but it also aimed to make searching in general much more fluid.  Today though, they’ve taken all of those new features and made them so 2011 by slapping them with the pretty stick.

As you  can see above, you now have a set of colorful icons along with a tabbed look to maneuver around that can be accessed by simply swiping downward.  From there, you can touch the “More” button which will bring you to a list of available search items or “apps” like Buzz, Picasa and Google Reader.  Everything, all in one place.

And this is going to sound odd since we can search from just about anywhere on our Android devices, but this new look and easy access to my favorite Google products has made the mobile version of google.com incredibly appealing.

Nothing that I know of that you can do to make it look all snazzy like this, so to see if the updated version is available to you, just head to google.com from your phone’s browser.

Today we sneaked in some of the newest creations by Koveleski in our “Show Us Your Screenies” post. We got lots of comments wondering where we got our wallpapers, well now, here they are. We teamed up with the “Da Kover“, and he pumped out these amazing wallpapers for everyone who enjoys spending time with us on the daily.

There are three versions available – one for your phone, tablet, and even your desktop. All you need to do is download the app, then apply how you would any other wallpaper. We want to thank Dave so much for hooking these up, and everyone else for enjoying Android as much as we do. If you want to support Dave, feel free to donate for all of his awesome work, or even follow him on Twitter.  

The Uber Music app by Federico Carnales has now moved out of Alpha, and is now in the Beta stages. The entire UI is now made up of a skinning engine, so you can be sure that you’ll be seeing custom skins very soon for this app. Fede is always looking for people to let him know if they run into any bugs/issues, so let us know down in the comments section if you notice anything.

In my opinion it looks better than stock, has a widget, “lockscreen control”, and now you can make it look however you want. That’s #winning in my book. Is everyone liking this yet, or are we running a different music app? Let us know. 

Wow.  So Google just unveiled Google+ which looks to be one hell of an impressive social tool that may even stretch beyond what Facebook has been doing for the last few years.  Through this new service (which is invite-only at this time – sign up here), Google is preaching the idea that users want to have more control over what they are sharing and who can see it.  I would 100% agree to that.  We all have different pockets of friends, groups, drinking buddies, sports teams, etc. that don’t necessarily need to see everything in our lives.  With Google+, you get to pick and choose who sees what, and that’s a pretty big thing (check out this demo site).

The whole “project” has an impressive set of features such as +Circles, +Sparks, +Hangouts, +Mobile and +Huddle that all come together to make this, at least to me, the next big phase in social networking and sharing.  I think the big struggle now is to figure out how we can pry all of our friends from Facebook and get them into using something new and fresh.  I guess we would also need to make sure they continue to purchase Android phones as well, until this launches on that other platform.

There are a whole set of videos to get you up to speed on each aspect of Google+ after the break, including a link to the mobile app.  Remember though, you have to receive an invite in order to use it.  

(K, Picolas, and Tato)

Can you believe that it has been something like 3 months since we last had a “Show us your home screens!” day?  Today’s event seems long overdue, so we’re hoping to see some really creative stuff now that there are hundreds of themes and app packs for both ADW and LauncherPro.  We also have a variety of devices that we cover on a daily basis in this Android world including tablets like the Motorola XOOM and Galaxy Tab 10.1 that bring a whole new customization element into the game.  This should be fun to watch.

For those that are new, what we’re asking for is a shot of one or all of your home screens in the comments followed by a little description of the setup.  This is how we share ideas, widgets, clocks, wallpapers, icon packs, themes, etc. with the rest of the DL community.

As you can see up top, we’ve got the 3 home screens of the DL staff – dirty details of the looks will be posted in the comments.

Update: We’ve posted up the wallpapers that we are all using here.

*Note – Taking screenshots can be done by non-rooted users through the Android SDK or with a variety of screenshot apps from the market if rooted..

Show us your home screens!

The folks over at PCMag have posted up the results of a cross-country road trip (21 cities) during which they tested all of the major mobile networks in the U.S. to determine which was the fastest.  They looked at both 3G and 4G networks from Verizon and Sprint, the fake 4G of AT&T, T-Mobile’s steadily increasing 4G, and some off-the-wall carriers like MetroPCS and Cricket to cover all bases.  The results are not surprising at all – Verizon’s new 4G LTE network easily came out on top with its incredibly fast, home replacement-esque data speeds.