The latest smartphone subscriber numbers are out , and the last three months have been kind to Google. Android’s still a relatively small player, but its usage base more than doubled since October. The iPhone, meanwhile, keeps on treading water. More

If the terrorists could vote, they’d vote for Candidate X— this argument is America’s greatest rhetorical treasure. So let’s apply it to smartphones, right now! I’ve got a picture of a high-level terrorist with an iPhone and everything! Updated The man pictured here is the recently captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef , who is world famous for precisely the kind of stuff that you don’t want to be famous for. Infamous, even! Update : Apparently the magazine misindentifies the man in the photo. That’s actually Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban official’s who’s been spotted with his iPhone before . ( Thanks, Ray! ) Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, next time you find yourself in an endless online flamewar about smartphones representing the side of Android or WebOS or Windows Mobile or BlackBerry, it is totally fine to call your opponent a terrorist

I never thought I’d forgive Time Warner for abominable service before I switched to FiOS—but I just might, if their plan to lease their pipes to AT&T and Verizon makes using an iPhone in NY actually tolerable. UPDATED . AT&T’s iPhone problems are two-fold. There’s the wireless aspect, which is having enough towers with enough spectrum for everybody—that’s probably what you’re familiar with. (The problem in really crowded areas is that there’s only so much wireless coverage you can provide before you run into issues like cross talk.

I dunno, their Twitter account seems real sad or something, like it could use a hug. [ Twitter ]

In the current smartphone market, you need to choose between LCD touchscreens (incredible UI versatility) and real QWERTY buttons (tactile feedback). But the MorphPad offers a third choice that’s somewhere in between. Little more than a proof of concept at the moment, this demo shows us a QWERTY Bluetooth remote filled with dynamic, reconfigurable buttons. This idea alone is beyond most current QWERTY implementation, but then Pelikon takes innovation a step further by allowing a majority of their keys to go blank and serve as a touch-sensitive pad (for mousing, gestures, etc). My main concern isn’t whether or not the tech works (you can spot it in Toshiba’s Biblio ), but whether or not the button-built touchpad really feels very comfortable to use. And frankly, to all the worried Blackberry/Sidekick loyalists in the house, touch screens really aren’t so bad to type on

Hooray for capitalism! Sprint was cool offering Palm Pixi for $100, until Verizon’s Palm Pixi Plus slid underneath them at $79. Sprint’s having none of that, slashing the original Palm Pixi’s price to a mere $50 for new customers, after all of the rebates and contracts and what have you. Remember , the candybar Pixi doesn’t have Wi-Fi and has a slightly smaller screen than the Pre, but if you or someone you know isn’t quite ready for a big boy phone, a $50 Pixi could be hard to resist. [ Sprint ]

Aaron Woodman, the director of consumer experiences for Microsoft’s mobile division, was a guest on today’s Engadget Show, and he had a nice surprise for everyone: a prototype of LG’s Windows Phone 7 Series phone. There’s not a whole lot in the way of details—it’s a slider that’s a bit thicker than the iPhone, it has a 5MP camera, and sports six hardware buttons—but it’s still exciting to see the new operating system on a branded device for the first time. Woodman wouldn’t confirm nor deny if Windows Phone 7 Series would support Mac OS, explaining that it was a topic that the team was currently discussing. Hey, at least the notion hasn’t been shut down out of hand, so we’ll take this as a no news is good news type of thing for now. Head over to Engadget for more pictures and a quick video clip of the LG phone in the round. [ Engadget ]

We recently heard that Android 2.1 was on its way to the Droid , but now sources tell AndroidandMe that all U.S. Android phones will be receiving Android 2.1 firmware in coming months, though some will require a wipe to upgrade. As we’ve heard is the case with the Droid, some niceties like animated wallpapers probably won’t make the jump, but if the updates come to fruition, increased text-to-speech support and enhanced widgets will likely come along with them. The price of getting up to date, Androidandme explains, might be wiping your phone clean. A bummer, but that’s life.

Online retail is nothing new, but now brick and mortar stores want to get in on the high-tech action. The New York Times has a disquieting look at new technologies that will make you shop ’til your signal drops. Take, for example, Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, which recently implemented a system called ScanLife that allows shoppers to find more information on products from their smart phones. So far, so good. But ScanLife also lets shoppers buy those products from their phones, even when seen in passing in a display window, even when the store is closed. Impulse buying just got a whole lot more impulsive

Yesterday we heard that a CDMA version of the Nexus One was approved by the FCC , and now Neowin has word from an anonymous Google employee that the Google phone will land on Verizon on March 23. That’s the day the CTIA wireless convention kicks off and it’s less than a month away; Perhaps a bit sooner than we’d expected, but certainly plausible. [ Neowin ]