All right, let’s see how this is supposed to work. Google releases the Android OS under an open source license, meaning that any handset maker can download the code and use it to power their smartphones. Only it hasn’t quite worked the way they expected. Each handset maker and wireless carrier is free to change the user interface and even the bundled software. Customers aren’t even assured that they can get the latest OS updates, even if they contain important security fixes. So you can say that there is no single Android OS branding that customers can count on.

In a curious decision, Google this week announced a $12.5 billion deal to acquire Motorola Mobility, a fading mobile handset maker. This will give them, according to revised estimates, some 24,500 patents, many network related. It means that Google is spending over $510 thousand for each patent. But it’s not certain how many of those patents will actually impact the current round of smartphone patent portfolio fights.

While the fallout from this move is only beginning to emerge, clearly Google is taking a drubbing. They don’t have any experience whatever in building hardware. Their previous attempt, the Google Nexus One smartphone, assembled by HTC, was an abject failure. At the time, Google was roundly, and justifiably criticized for having no clue about providing customer support. It’s not that you can expect them to fare better with Motorola Mobility, which sells products to wireless carriers and, by dint of their set top boxes, cable companies. It’s those customers who provide most of the technical support to end users, so Google gains nothing from this transaction.

The biggest problem of all involves Google’s other Android OS partners, particularly Samsung and HTC. Sure, they have already claimed that they are pleased with the acquisition, and are assured of continued access to Google technology. At least that’s what they say in public. Privately, you have believe that executives throughout these companies are using such terms as “dirty-so-and-so” and worse to describe Google’s clear betrayal of trust.

Certainly betraying one’s partners is nothing new. Microsoft did that to their PlaysForSure licensees when they created the failed Zune music player. When they couldn’t mount a workable defense against the iPod, they attempted to imitate Apple’s infamous walled garden, with tight integration between hardware and software. It didn’t work.

No doubt Google wants to accomplish the same thing, making Motorola Mobility their first among equals Android OS partner. But you can bet that other Android licensees are looking for alternatives even as I write this column.

Some might consider Windows Phone 7, although that OS hasn’t really caught on. Besides, Microsoft is lavishing their attention — and billions of dollars — on Nokia. There’s no chance other handset makers will get a fair shake.

There’s already a published report that Kim Soon-taek, the head of the Samsung Group, has already ordered his employees to expand a development push for Bada, their home-grown mobile OS. If Bada appears on more and more Samsung smartphones, it’ll come at the expense of Android. Besides, that way they won’t have to continue to confront the wrath, and ongoing intellectual property lawsuits, from Apple. That assumes Bada is free of potential patent issues.

Sure, there’s no guarantee that Bada will succeed in the marketplace, but that move might seriously erode the Android OS’s market share moving forward. If other handset makers cut their losses, Google might find that Motorola Mobility is their only credible licensee. But at least they’ll earn real profits from Android OS, rather than depend on customers clicking targeted ads to generate profits. Or maybe not, since Motorola Holdings has been drowning in red ink of late.

Meantime, there is that report that HP is discontinuing the WebOS, and, of course, the poor selling TouchPad tablet. WebOS, acquired when HP purchased Palm, hasn’t done very well, so maybe it’s not a big deal. HP is also planning to spin off their PC division, a source of stagnant sales and slim profits. And some believe the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook may be next on the chopping block.

So where does all this leave Apple? Well, if the various handset makes cannot coalesce around a single OS, and offer loads of incompatible mobile gadgets instead, the iOS will shine brighter than ever. And if you count the sales of the iPad into the overall figures of mobile computer sales, Apple is number one with a bullet around the world.

Of course, how Mac sales are faring won’t be certain until the quarter nears an end. Yes, there is one industry analyst who polled the sales over a weekend from four university stores and imagined that Mac sales are plummeting, but there’s no evidence such a thing is happening elsewhere.

Meantime, it doesn’t appear that this week’s developments are going to have any immediate impact on the patent-related lawsuits. Sure, they are huge and expensive distractions to a company actually doing business. But as long as the patent system is broken, things won’t change.

No doubt Google hoped to leverage all those Motorola Mobility patents to mount a defense, and rely on cross-licensing agreements to keep the wolves at bay. But few expect that acquisition, when it closes as expected next year, is going to accomplish anything but halt the growth of the Android OS. How could it be otherwise?

History shows that Apple will generally follow up a major OS upgrade with a .1 maintenance release within the first month. So it came as no surprise that 10.7.1 appeared in the Software Update app for OS X Lion users on Tuesday afternoon. Developers may have been disappointed, since Apple supposedly never released a version for them to test.

Regardless, the ins and outs of 10.7.1 are brief and to the point:

• Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video in Safari.
• Resolve an issue that may cause system audio to stop working when using HDMI or optical audio out.
• Improve the reliability of Wi-Fi connections.
• Resolve an issue that prevents transfer of your data, settings, and compatible applications to a new Mac running OS X Lion.
• Resolve an issue in which an admin user account could be missing after upgrading to OS X Lion.

This is all pretty straightforward stuff. It was also a surprisingly small update, starting at 17.4MB for older Macs, but much larger for this year’s MacBook Airs and Mac minis, which contain extra fixes. If you download the update directly from Apple, it totals 79.29MB, presumably to accommodate a number of different models. But compared to the usual weighty Apple update, the download is reasonably quick, perhaps because not a whole lot was fixed.

As usual, the early chatter is mixed. Some suggest that other problems were also addressed, such as a curious crash on some Macs, particularly this year’s iMac, when you play a video after the unit wakes from Sleep mode. It’s too early for this fix to be confirmed, though one of my colleagues, commentator Kirk McElhearn, says his iMac seems to be working properly now. He’ll continue the testing in the next few days.

Other Mac users complain that the irregular Wi-Fi connections have not been fixed, although truth to tell, wireless networking issues have come and gone over the years.

I do notice somewhat snappier performance, and a little sleuthing shows that some system processes seem to be grabbing fewer resources. Maybe Apple just fine tuned the code, or the update cleaned up some faulty relics of the original Lion installation on my late 2009 27-inch iMac.

However, I also noticed a peculiar loss of Spaces functionality. Now Spaces, a somewhat flaky virtual desktop feature of OS X, has always seemed to lose its memory of the apps you store on a particular desktop. Apps seem to move from one desktop to another, or unaccountably become available in all desktops. Well, after 10.7.1 was installed, all of my Spaces setups were gone. I had to reestablish them again. You might suggest that the preferences got mangled, but I deleted them after the original Lion install just to start from scratch.

Or maybe Spaces is still too buggy for prime time, though I like the concept of being able to configure separate workspaces to reduce screen clutter. In any case, I have again deleted the two Spaces preferences, logged out and in again. I’ll let you readers know if these steps fix what ails that troubled feature. I still like the concept, if only the bugs can be ironed out.

One problem evidently fixed is the occasional loss of streaming audio when I’m listening to a feed from a radio station in Safari. One of my favorites is a Phoenix talk station that doesn’t travel well over the air to this part of the valley, and thus I depend on the online stream for decent reception. On occasion, the audio would drop out. The station’s webmaster even responded to my complaint, saying he couldn’t duplicate the problem, but it hasn’t returned since 10.7.1 was loaded.

From here, all eyes are on 10.7.2, which is expected in September to coincide with the release of iCloud. Already there are published reports that developers have been testing 10.7.2, but evidently are focusing strictly on iCloud issues. But another month would give Apple additional time to clear up the loose ends in Lion, not that I’ve encountered many.

As OS X releases go, Lion appears to have come along quite well from the starting gate. It wasn’t without trouble, but one frequent poster’s complaint that 10.7 is another Windows Vista in the making is way over the top. Every single Mac OS or OS X upgrade was originally labeled as fatally flawed, in need of serious repair. Somehow Apple survived all the teething pains, such as they were. There were even a few potential data loss issues along the way in some of those releases. But it’s also true that no amount of testing can guarantee a perfect user experience for everyone. If you’re skeptical of Lion, no harm in waiting for a few more maintenance updates before you decide whether it’s worth the download.

I’m more interested at this point in getting the expected Lion-savvy updates for some of my favorite apps, so I can start to rely on Auto Save, Version, and other promising 10.7 features.

You have heard over and over again how Apple’s tight control over software and hardware is a bad thing. Software needs to be open, Apple needs to license their OS to other companies to be a credible player in the tech industry. And how dare they rule upon which apps can appear in their various app stores? The public won’t stand for it.

But if that’s the case, why are other companies attempting to duplicate Apple’s carefully honed vertical integration scheme? Why is Apple so successful?

Back in the days when the iPod took over the digital music player market, Microsoft recruited hardware makers to license their PlaysForSure system, so you could buy all your music in one place regardless of which music player you owned, other than an iPad of course. The phrase “iPad killer” came and went, because none of those music players caught on.

Microsoft’s solution, or attempted solution actually, was to simply mimic Apple. They contracted with Toshiba to build a music player dubbed Zune, and provided software and a music download service to complete the package. This integrated ecosystem followed Apple’s playbook, while at the same time leaving the companies who licensed PlaysForSure to pick up the table scraps. But the Zune failed, showing that just copying Apple by making both the software and the hardware isn’t enough if the product isn’t compelling.

Now Google proclaimed their Android OS, which is built on Linux, as an open source OS, one that can be freely downloaded and used by licensees. Only it is not that open, since Google is notorious for placing restrictions on the degree to which licensees can alter the system. It has also been reported that the GPL licensing agreement under which Android is available doesn’t allow Google to pick and choose how their hardware partners configure their mobile gear. But that doesn’t stop Google. Software has to be free, and licensees were otherwise supposedly treated equally.

Well maybe not equally when Google contracted with HTC to build the failed Nexus One smartphone, supposedly the showpiece of Android technology. Yes, free and open. But the real truth is that Google will do what it takes to get more Android gear into the wild, since most of their income comes from the targeted ads in their apps and search engines. The more Android customers, the more eyeballs available to, one hopes, click on those ads and start the Google cash registers ringing.

But faced with a growing number of lawsuits over patents that target their partners, Google has tried to increase their own small patent portfolio. Now Motorola Mobility has loads and loads of patents, so certainly Google might have felt tempted. The mobile handset maker is a spin off of the original Motorola company, more or less intended to get rid of the failing mobile division. Indeed, Motorola Holding’s share of the cell phone market has been shrinking year after year, and they continue to report losses.

So perhaps Google only cared about the patents, but having an in-house handset maker as part of the package might have been the icing on the cake. When this ill-thought deal is finalized by next year, there will be a new generation of Droids — or whatever Google cares to call them — which will contain the unvarnished versions of Android, free of interface tampering and altered app bundles. Assuming the wireless carriers will cede the sort of control they gave up to Apple to get the iPhone, Google would have the ability to directly push OS updates. After attacking Apple for having a closed ecosystem, Google is moving in precisely that direction. Can you beat that?

But not quite closed, because Google still claims that their independent hardware partners will get equal access to the Android OS for both smartphones and tablets. Nothing will change, except that Google will now be competing with those same companies courtesy of their Motorola division. You have to think that such manufacturers HTC and Samsung are quickly looking for alternatives, so they aren’t stuck at the bottom of the food chain. It sort of reminds you what happened to Microsoft’s PlaysForSure partners when the Zune came out.

I can see possible short-term advantages to Google. They wouldn’t have to depend mostly on ad clicks to earn their keep. They’d receive revenue from handset sales. But wait, isn’t Motorola reporting losses, and reduced market share? And since Motorola Holdings as an independent company hasn’t set the tech world afire with their handset and tablet designs, how is that supposed to change under Google’s management? Where is Google’s expertise at designing and building hardware? That’s right, they don’t have any.

As far as those cherished patents are concerned, most appear to be in the area of networking, and aren’t likely to impact Apple or other mobile gadget makers.

Worse, you have to think that the other Android licensees are going to be justifiably concerned over this state of affairs. Published reports indicate that they are even now looking for alternatives. Perhaps some will jump in bed with Microsoft, which has already made Nokia first among equals for Windows Phone 7.

It may well be that the Google/Motorola combo may end up actually reducing Android’s market share, as other handset makers jump ship.

To make the whole affair even more confusing, there are now published reports that troubled Research In Motion may be shopping around the company, or at least the patent portfolio. Having a prosperous parent may deliver lots of development cash, but RIM already has an integrated ecosystem, a walled garden. It doesn’t seem to have helped all that much. Besides, how can acquiring a failing company suddenly make it successful?

Andy Rubin and the rest of the people who manage the Android OS at Google can’t be feeling the love these days. Such Android licensees as HTC, Motorola and even Samsung are being pounded with look and feel lawsuits from Apple, claiming patent violations. Indeed, Apple scored a major victory against HTC covering three patents, and effectively blocked the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Europe, at least for now.

Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, once a member of Apple’s board of directors, has accused Apple of suing rather than innovating. Of course, anyone who has used any of Apple’s products realizes that this allegation is simply absurd. At the same time, Apple has the perfect right to seek to defend their intellectual property, even at the expense of killing a competitor’s product. It’s up to the courts to determine of those legal filings have merit.

One of Google’s key problems up till now involves the lack of a boatload patents to defend, and that they have to depend on other companies to build mobile devices incorporating their OS. In a loose sense, this is similar to Microsoft’s dilemma when the iPod arrived. They had a PlaysForSure software ecosystem that was available for license by digital music player makers. But it didn’t do any good. So, in turn, they modified and rebranded a Toshiba product and begat the Zune with a different ecosystem, double-crossing their hardware partners. In retrospect, that failed too.

Up till now, Google didn’t build anything. They, like Microsoft, licensed their technology to others. But that’s poised to change in a curious fashion, with the announced acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billon in cash. Assuming the deal passes muster with the regulatory authorities — and it probably will — Motorola will become part of Google some time next year, but that company will be run independently, as if that means anything.

The acquisition will give Google thousands and thousands of patents to defend. But it will also deliver a large-scale development and manufacturing operation with which to build smartphones and tablets. This puts Google in a position somewhat similar to Microsoft, licensing a mobile ecosystem to other companies, while at the same time competing with those companies.

Yes, there have been the predictable statements from the likes of HTC and Samsung that they are totally in favor of the deal, even though they stand to suffer, which strike me as clumsy efforts at spin control. Nobody doubts they’ll be regarded as second best in having access to the latest and greatest Android technology, even though Google promises to continue to license the OS without cost.

Certainly Android has succeeded very much by dint of volume, not innovation. Few dispute the clear resemblances to the iOS. But being free, handset makers have embraced Android and built a number of models with different feature sets and price points. This is similar in a rough sense to the Windows PC market, where you also have loads of models from which to choose. But it’s far more confusing otherwise, because each Android licensee, not to mention the wireless carriers themselves, are free to alter the OS to provide a customized look and feel, and even a different selection of bundled software. Customers aren’t even assured of getting the latest and greatest OS updates, since that’s the province of the carrier.

Once the Motorola acquisition closes, you can bet that Google will lavish extra attention on their very own hardware maker in an attempt to play the Apple game. They will want to tightly integrate the hardware with Android. Those who buy Motorola smartphones and tablets will be assured of having the latest and greatest Android OS releases preloaded and configured precisely as released, without change. OS updates will be pushed as needed. That of course assumes Google can strike deals with the carriers to give them full control over the platform. But certainly Apple set the precedent.

The problem, however, is that Motorola Mobility has lost its mojo big time, although sales have been on the increase of late. In the old days of the StarTAC and other classic handsets, Motorola was king. They set the standard. These days, their mobile gadgets are very much the same as the mobile gadgets from other makers. The Motorola Xoom tablet, a showpiece of Android OS technology, failed miserably in the marketplace.

You have to wonder whether Google truly believes that acquiring a company whose glory days are in the distant past will allow them to somehow create magic. And even if Motorola mobile gear becomes flashier, more tightly integrated with Android, how will HTC and Samsung react? They are already confronting the Apple gauntlet. Will they just ditch Android and try to roll their own OS, which, by the way, is something Motorola claimed to be doing before Google made an offer? Will they embrace Windows Phone 7? No, wait a minute, hasn’t Microsoft already made their sweetheart deal with Nokia as the preferred licensee?

More to the point, Google hasn’t a lick of experience building hardware, or running a hardware maker. Sure, they might hope to rely on the executive team at Motorola Holdings to do the heavy lifting, but, as I said, there’s no evidence that this company can suddenly invent the magic potion to match Apple.

Or is this another of those acquisitions spawn of desperation? Can they really create that silk purse from Motorola’s sow’s ear? Only time will tell.