Re #2: How old is your Android phone? Chrome supports input placeholders. They should have a shiv for placeholder support in older browsers, to be honest.
It's a Droid Charge running Gingerbread. Pretty old! I was going to get one of the Galaxy S3 developer edition phones, but those were only available for a few hours a couple of weeks ago.
BTW I hope you meant shim! :-)
(Edit: Oh, I see that "shiv" is also used to mean the same thing as "shim" in the HTML community...)
