Its easy to forget that at one time Google and Apple made a pretty cosy couple.The two companies were on friendly terms, so much so that Eric Schmidt was even sitting on Apple board of directors. You would not know that now of course given the increasing anomosity between the two, especially when it comes to the massive global patent war Android find sitself embroiled in. However, we saw something of a harking back to former times in an interview Eric Schmidt recently gave where he rated Steve Jobs as the best company boss of the last century.

Schmidt was speaking on stage at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference when he made the comments. He saisd that Jobs was "probably the best" company boss in 50 or 100 years, responding to a question from the audience. Justifying such exalted praise Schmidt cited the fact that Jobs had built up Apple into apowerful company, not once, but twice.

Google is killing off its Slide team and shutting down most of the mobile apps that the team created in order to focus more on Google plus.

Google purchased Slide last year for about $200 million and the team was thought to give the search giant a much-needed boost in the social side. Since then, Larry Page has taken over as CEO and has implemented a majorreorganization. The Slide team had been operating independently and apparently did not have a real role in Page Google. Slide former CEO, Max Levchin, will be leaving the company.

I cannot say I am really surprised, as Google is all-in with Google+ and Page is really focusing the company efforts on fewer products "more wood behind fewer arrows." Slide created apps like Pool Party and the just-released Photovine and these duplicated features that are in the Google+ apps. In fact, the Photovine app did not even work with Android.

Believe it or not, its going on a year now since we were first introduced to Google idea of bringing the internet to your TV, with soft launches of its Logitech Revue and Sony TV products last September. Now, apparently Google is working on bringing its system to the UK within the next six months according toa Telegraph report sourcing Eric Schmidt.

Anyone who is followed Google TV knows that its been a pretty turbulent year to say the least. Not too long ago prices were drastically slashed by Logitech and Sony to help move its products off the shelves at Best Buy-retailers, which is great news for UK buyers looking to get the Google set-top-boxes at an affordable price.

For those of you out there who do not know much about these set-top-boxes, allow me to help fill you in. Google TV is a connected TV platform from the search giant, which integrates Google's Android operating system and the Linux version of Google Chrome browser, which creates an interactive television overlay on top of existing internet television.

One of the cool features of google plus mobile app is instant upload i.e upload the pictures or video as you shoot instantaneously to the google+ social network.

 As cool as it sounds, sometimes it is not welcomed by everyone. By default instant upload is turned on in your google+ mobile application. Now for example, lets say you are using a limited data plan or have less battery, when you take a picture or a video, your google+ mobile app will immediately upload the media to your google plus account which might cause you run data overages or drain your battery.

If you are running into above constraints, the good news is, you can disable instant upload or configure to upload photo or video only when you are on a WiFi / mobile charging.

Here are the steps of how to disable or configure instant upload settings:

• In you google+ application, go to Settings
• Goto the bottom section where you wil find Instant Upload (You can uncheck to disable Instant upload altogether)
• If you choose to use Instant Upload only through WiFi, click on the Instant Upload Settings option
• Click on the Mobile Uploads settings and choose Photo and Video via Wi-Fi only
• If you choose to save battery, Check the Battery uploads option (This will enable to upload photo, video only when charging)

Games are one of the biggest time-wasters on Facebook and now Google has announced that they have added a Games section to their Google+ social network. Unlike Facebook however, gamer-related messages in Google+ will not spam your stream.

A Games tab should appear in your Google+ page, just like there are tabs for Home, Photos, Profile and Circles. Ones there, you will see game updates and invites from people in your circles and check out what games they’ve played recently. Those updates do not show up in your regular stream, only in the Games tab, which avoids clutter.

The games update is rolling out right now, so its not available for everyone. It should be soon though.

The Google+ social network is growing steadily still and it has just welcomed iPad and iPod Touch users. Up until now the iOS app was only available to the iPhone, but the update that was just released fixed that. The bad news here is that iPad users are getting nothing more than an upscaled iPhone version that plainly is not optimized for the bigger screen.

The update to the app also brings new Huddle settings, aggregated circle add notifications and last, but not least performance and stability improvements. Hangouts are still missing in the latest version, though.

The Google dev team announced a new feature for the Gmail web interface. The world most popular mailbox just got a preview pane, which allows you to check out an email without opening.

Its almost hard to believe that this feature, which has been available on most desktop email clients and even the web interfaces of some competing mail services for a while now, is only now making its way to Gmail.

To enable this you will need to enter the Labs tab in Gmail Settings, where you will see a toggle button in the top right corner of your message list, which lets you switch between preview and list views.

After yesterdays update for Google Maps for Android, today is Gmail turn the updated Android app now boasts better performance, can save bandwidth by syncing only priority email, and gives you fine-grained control over notifications.

For each label that you have enabled syncing, you can enable/disable notifications and select a ringtone for each one. Depending on how you set up your Gmail filters, this can be used, for example, to assign different ringtones for emails from colleagues and from family.

Gmail v2.3.5 for Android also remembers for which senders you have hit "Show Pictures" so you do not have to do it every time.

The sticky message actions can now be selectively be switched off in landscape mode or altogether. The new Gmail app also features better TalkBalk support for accessibility and general performance improvements.

Google a company that can best be described as an engineer wet dream. It was founded by engineers, its run by engineers, and unless you have got hard data to support any of your statements during a meeting, you will be ignored. That being said, the stereotype of engineers being a bit… how should we put this, out of touch with both the formal and informal rules governing society, is definitely there when you look at some of the past decisions they have made around the areas of user privacy just look at Google Buzz.

The world breathed a collective sigh of relief about a month ago when former CEO Eric Schmidt said that despite the company having facial recognition technology in house, "its the only technology that Google built and after looking at it, we decided to stop." That does not explain then this recent report from the Wall Street Journal that says Google has spent an as yet to be identified sum of money on a 7 year old company known as Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition; "PittPatt" for short. Its lead by 3 specialists with Phs from Carnegie Mellon University, exactly the type of talent Google loves.

Google Plus, or Google+, is now available for iOS in the iTunes App Store. The social networking service, in which you divide up your friends, family and acquaintances into "Circles" has taken off in the past few weeks and has even seen defectors from Facebook. When the service launched, we said that mobile users might make or break it, and that most early adopters probably use mobile devices for social networking. Google+ has been available for Android since it launched, and now iPhone and iPad users can finallyenjoy a mobile version of it, too.

Here is the iTunes description of the app:

Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler. Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most. And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in.

Features:
* Circles let you share the right things with just the right people.
* Stream is where you can get updates from your circles or see what people are saying about things nearby.
* Huddle is super-fast group messaging for everyone in your circles.

Google+ is only available for users 13 and older.