Global mobile phone sales rose 10% year over year and 11.3 percent last quarter according to two research firms, Strategy Analytics and IDC.

Strategy Analytics said global handset shipments reached 324 million units last quarter, which represented a 10% gain over the same quarter in 2008.

Nokia, Samsung, and LG held the top spots in global market [...]

Google officially announced their new Android phone, Nexus One, manufactured by HTC. It comes with a 3.7-inch touchscreen, 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, GPS, 802.11n Wi-Fi support, digital compass, accelerometer, light and proximity sensor, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, 3.5mm headphone jack, and a multicolored status alerting trackball.

Google Nexus One runs on Android 2.1, which features [...]

The passing decade in the cellular market featured overwhelming growth in the penetration of mobile phones and outstanding breakthrough in their capabilities. Ten years ago, there were about 700 million mobile subscribers, while today there are about 4.6 billion, representing a global penetration rate of 67%. Out of the 1,136,401 mobile phones that were shipped [...]

Motorola is getting ready to launch its own Android application store, called SHOP4APPS. SHOP4APPS is accessible both from a Web browser and from a free mobile client called MotoAppstore (still in the testing phase).

The upcoming Android app store will feature a MyLocker section (where you can check your download history), automatic notifications when new versions [...]

Orange will launch its own application store this month. At first, the Orange App Store will be filled with 2,000 games, 500 applications and ringtones, and wallpapers for some Java-enabled phones. The App Store will become available on Android and BlackBerry devices during the first quarter of next year. Symbian and possibly WinMo phones will [...]

Nokia plans to reduce the amount of S40 devices that it releases and increase the percentage of smartphones in its portfolio. Both platforms currently utilized by the Finnish company (Symbian and Maemo) are planned to increase their share. Nokia plans major renewal of the aging Symbian UI and the launch of the first Maemo 6 device [...]

Nokia has just announced the availability of Qt 4.6, the newest version of its cross-platform application and UI framework. Qt 4.6 comes with many new features, as well as with support for more platforms: Symbian, Windows 7, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and the yet-to-come Maemo 6. Support for Maemo 5 should come soon, too.

Qt [...]

Embalze has officially announced First Else, a phone “built from scratch” over the last two years and now powered by Access Linux Platform (ALP) 3.0, which is LiMo compliant and has support for classic Palm OS and Java apps. But on top of ALP, ELSE Mobile have put a new UI called ELSE Intuition.

Powered by [...]

A new report out from Gartner indicates that Apple ranked third in worldwide smartphone sales in Q3 2009. The seven million iPhones sold by Apple in 3Q09 earned it a 17.1% share of the global smartphone market.

Meanwhile, Nokia’s share of the smartphone market reached an all time low in the 3Q09 at 39%, compared with [...]

Samsung announced its own smartphone OS. The Samsung bada open mobile OS will be launched in December this year, when a SDK is planned to be made available. It is expected to gradually replace Symbian and WinMo in Samsung’s smartphone portfolio.

Samsung bada is described as being simple for developers to use and having a ground-breaking [...]

AdMob announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. This is really impressive given the shaky mobile advertising business.

Read more: www.admob.com/google

Verizon Wireless launches its first two Android-powered smartphones: Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris. Motorola Droid is the first Android smartphone to feature the version 2.0 platform. A successful launch is regarded by many as critical to Motorola’s future success, as the company attempts to regain market share.

Verizon and Google’s newest commercial for the Droid. The commercial’s called Stealth, and it’s rather cool. Can anyone remember when was the last time a Motorola phone caused so much anticipation or excitement?

Watch the video at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9fXYQjwR0w

Nokia release a new ApiBridge component which enables developers to simplify development and extend the features of Web Runtime widgets by using various capabilities of Symbian OS. The capabilities available include:

Uploading files.
Capturing video, image, and audio.
Reading files.
Resizing images.
Creating image thumbnail.
Using the logging service.
Using the location service.
Using the media management Service

http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/d697a64f-ddae-4937-8151-be157b542d26/ApiBridge.html

The mobile phone market showed slight signs of recovery in Q3 2009, as 290.5 million cell phones were sold during the quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, or 287.1 million units, according to IDC.

All five major handset vendors sold more phones in Q3 than in Q2, save for Motorola, which slipped to fifth place, previously occupied [...]

The Symbian Foundation announced that Qualcomm and Fujitsu joined its board of directors.

Qualcomm joined the Symbian Foundation through its wholly owned subsidiary Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), which will have the role of “optimizing open source software for use with Qualcomm technology.”

Fujitsu, which sold more than 40 million Symbian-based phones in Japan “will work with foundation [...]

WRT development and tools demo: This webinar will cover Web Runtime development on Nokia devices using Aptana Studio, tips and tricks, and home screen widget integration. This is a technical session that involves development environment setup and coding. (No slide set) Attendees are expected to have a basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and mobile devices.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/a3a61b21-2e56-4bb9-9c9c-d5ed0d14b35c/Web_Runtime_Coding_With_Aptana_WRT_Plug_In_Session_2.html

Check out also this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opZ69P-0Jbc

The Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).

Android 2.0 brings new APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, developers can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources.

For users, Android 2.0 supports multiple accounts that can [...]

According to the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC), smartphones equipped with Android will reach 6.5 million units in 2009 and grow to 31.8 million units in 2013. Also, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for Android phones will be significantly higher than the overall CAGR for smartphone shipments. Overall shipments of Android-equipped products, [...]

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Emblaze Mobile and ACCESS unveiled ELSE INTUTION, a Linux-based mobile platform, that is said to match the functionality of “top ranked MP3 players, best-in-class GPS devices, and more, while maintaining an exceptional ease and simplicity of use.”

Source: Engadget