Dude, you're a barista.

It's simple accounting. Google makes money off Android whether they sell a tablet that contains it or not. Apple, on the other hand, has to pay their development costs through device sales. Similarly the overhead of Apple store real estate and employee costs has to be paid for by device sales, where else do you think their revenue per employee comes from?

Google's overheads for this product are much, much lower than Apple's. No glitzy stores, free operating system, minimal hardware development costs, and either direct sales or channel sales of the higher-margin 16GB product only.

So, it seems likely that Google is making a profit, just not a massive one, and this is likely to increase as components get cheaper. The Kindle Fire's cost of manufacture is down to $139 now, so they are no longer subsidizing either.

Google aren't subsidizing anything at these prices. According to Forbes, "The $199 Nexus 7 8 GB variant costs exactly $151.75 to build while the $249 Nexus 7 16 GB variant costs $159.25. This implies gross margins of nearly 25% to 35% for the device, which are closer to what Apple makes on each iPad." Apple's gross margin on the "new iPad" is around 20%.

On the same chart (uswitch.com mobile tracker) the Galaxy S2 has outsold the iPhone 4S every month except April 2012, which was the only month that the 4S ever hit #1. So really the S3 is just taking the place of the S2.

Bookmarking all tabs is right-click on any tab, Bookmark All Tabs. Prompt for download location is a setting in Tools, Options, Under the Hood.

No, 65% of Android Market apps are free or ad supported, where only 36% of Apple app store apps are free or ad supported (source Distimo report April 2011). In absolute numbers there are more free apps on the Android Market than there are in the Apple app store.

The Samsung Galaxy S has had Bluetooth HID support for keyboard and mouse since Android 2.2. I've been using it with Bluetooth SPP since version 2.1, but it has a quirk where it won't connect to a serial device with class of service = 0, not sure if they've fixed that yet.

The Galaxy S doesn't use the Bluez stack, it uses some Broadcom closed-source code instead. It doesn't support L2CAP so you can't use Wiimotes.

A good digital scope costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars, so as a hobbyist I can't really justify that, but a $30 Logic Shrimp is just fine. I'm using it instead of a scope to do basic viewing of suspect or undocumented signals. When some pulse-width code driving a servo on a PIC32 wasn't working, for example, it was a useful check on exactly what was being generated.

According to this all the other Australian carriers already have it. Some European phones have an official version 2.2.1 upgrade now, which is a huge performance improvement. You can flash custom ROMs with this as a base. Also Cyanogenmod 7 for SGS, based on Gingerbread, is in alpha testing.

The tablet uses a PDMI cable which is a standard, albeit an emerging one.

Blame your carrier, people in the rest of the world have had the 2.2 upgrade since October-November last year.

It does support Bluetooth keyboards, all tablets with Honeycomb will (the Galaxy S also supports them through some Samsung customizations). HDMI and USB is provided through the dock connector and the $50 multimedia dock.

Like open source software it's not just being able to change the design, it's having access to the full internal details of the product. Companies are encouraged to produce open-designed hardware or variants of it because it's cheaper than designing new hardware and marketing it from scratch, and when you buy it you get the full details of how it was made, so you can easily use, repair, reprogram and extend it without having to beg implementation details from a vendor who is uncooperative because they're trying to shield their proprietary designs from competitors.

Look at what Seeedstudio are doing with Arduino boards for example; they have taken the open-source Arduino design and extended it in interesting ways (Seeeduino Film for example) and they publish the full circuit diagrams, board layouts and firmware so if you want to mod or fix their boards you can.

Apps can include background services, but by design they can't start the services on install, they are only allowed to start them when the application is run for the first time, or when the device is rebooted. However they can hook system events on install so the app can be launched when the phone receives an SMS for example.