Canalys have just released their smartphone statistics for Q2 2008.

38% of smartphones shipping in EMEA have GPS integrated
Smartphone growth is slowing compared to the previous 18 months
58% of phones ship with WiFi
Nokia has 71.2% of the market, declining from 79.7%
Devices with touch screens represented 13% of the smartphone market

At first sight the Canalys statistics seem […]

There’s an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal…
"Apple sold an average of $1 million a day in applications for a total of about $30 million in sales over the month, Mr. Jobs said."
"Mr. Jobs said developers’ share of iPhone application sales in the first month was about $21 million, of which the top 10 […]

There’s an interesting article at MobileInternetTrends reporting on Arun Sarin’s challenge to the mobile industry to whittle down the number of operating systems currently supported for mobile phones.
"We have 30 or 40 operating systems right now, if we had three or five operating systems, then that would be a good thing."
While I can see […]

AppleInsider has an article ‘iPhone OS vs. other mobile platforms‘
While I can excuse this Apple-centric site of having some bias, I have to challenge the following…
"This rapid pacing of Apple’s free updates is unheard of on competing smartphone platforms…The Symbian partnership has delivered four incremental updates to Symbian 9.0 since 2004, roughly one per year."
The […]

There’s an entertaining piece at the Inquirer about analyst firm J. Gold Associates predicting Symbian and Android will merge…
"Gold believes the ‘true’ open version of Symbian won’t be available for around 18-24 months, allowing time for the two code bases to be consolidated into a superior open-source product."
Unbelievable - at least technically as well as […]

In Symbian, Just for Fun, David Wood talks about some research ideas at Symbian and how they might make Symbian development easier…
"I see lots of API improvement projects inside the Symbian labs - such as the experimental forthcoming ZString class alternative to text descriptors, and the […]

Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Radar has what I think is a contentious post where he has analysed newsgroups for references to mobile platform names from which he has tried to infer developer interest.
 
I don’t think his results will be very accurate. Firstly, developers don’t just use newsgroups any more. Most use web sites, wikis and […]