The U.S. government likes to do things its own way. Along those lines, it has decided to embrace Android as a smartphone platform for soldiers and other government employees because of the control it can exert over the software, which in turn underscores how much control Android partners have over the software.

Much has been made of the mobile risks that Facebook laid out in its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week. Essentially, it’s seeing/pushing massive growth in mobile, but it still hasn’t tried out advertising, its most effective route to revenues, on this platform. That’s not to say it won’t. But meanwhile, there is another area where Facebook is already making money through mobile.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in the last 24 hours has been dealt not one but two blows in court cases involving Motorola (NYSE: MMI) and patents in Germany, one involving IP licensing on older iPhone models (not the 4S) and one involving iCloud. However, as the day progressed, an injunction on the sale of the older iPhone models was lifted as the cases continue to develop.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has a dilemma when it comes to the Android Market: its permissive no-review-necessary policy means that anyone can write nearly any kind of application for the platform, including malware. The company is introducing a new service Thursday that attempts to strike a balance between protecting Android users from malware while still offering developers more freedom than Apple’s app review policy.

Microsoft’s plan for Windows Phone 8—which appears to be moving in step with its overall Windows 8 launch strategy—has been leaked, and the company is planning to take some big steps forward in terms of overall performance, mobile payments, and voice calling.

In a new business-oriented social media site, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) aims to index “the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web.” A better definition might be “what people are doing on Twitter.”

Do Kindle Fire owners still like their devices now that they’ve had a few months to kick the tires? A new survey indicates that for the most part, they’re more pleased with their purchase than those who bought other Android tablets last year but less satisfied than iPad owners.

Two European companies are this week taking venture capital in the games space…

Mobile advertising may not yet be something that Facebook has explored in its strategy to monetize its massive user base, and given the growth we’ve seen in the space, you can argue that it might be missing a trick.

It was five years ago that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) executives brushed off the idea of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as “not a threat” to Nokia’s top position in mobile sales. After all, Apple was only making smartphones and Nokia was still leading in that still-niche category, as well as mobiles overall. Fast forward to today, and the swift rise of Apple underscores (once more) how short-sighted that view really was.

Facebook‘s nearly 200-page S-1 filing appears to have crippled the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar website with the mass of people going there to take a peek at the social network’s numbers. That traffic may well be matched by the weight of numbers in the filing itself. Here’s a look at some of them:

It took the whole day, but Facebook finally—as many expected—filed its S-1 with the Securities Exchange Commission for its long-awaited IPO. While guesstimates for how much Facebook would try to raise ranged from $5 billion to $10 billion, in the end, it looks like it is the lower of that range: $5 billion.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has accused Samsung of “slavishly copying” its hardware designs; but whether or not that is true, one area where Samsung is taking a note from Apple is in how it debuts its big products. The company today announced that it would not be launching its next big smartphone, the Galaxy S III, at this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, as originally expected.

Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) will be pinning its comeback hopes on the first generation of BlackBerry phones to run its BlackBerry 10 operating system, and it seems to have settled on a design. Leaked media images to a friendly outlet suggest that RIM wants to borrow cues from the Playbook tablet when it releases those handsets later this year.