IDC forecasts that worldwide shipments of smartphones, will surpass 390 million units, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.9% for the 2009–2013 period. In a market that was once dominated by a handful of pioneers, such as BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, newcomers touting open standards and intuitive design and navigation have garnered strong end-user and handset vendor interest.

BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 were designed years ago – the traditional strengths of these software platforms are rapidly becoming liabilities in the fast-paced smartphone market. Michael Vakulenko answers a critical question: are user interface face-lifts, application stores or even going open source enough for the legacy smartphone platforms to stand-up to the challenges posed by iPhone and Android?

Hekkus Sound System is a small and fast sound engine for WinCE/iPhone/Symbian/Win32/MacOSX/Linux/PSP/GP2X and .NET applications, expecially designed for games. Latest release adds support for iPhone / iPod touch and Mac OS X through OpenAL and OGG Vorbis files support on all platforms.

F.O.S.D.E.M is about to start for the whole weekend, it's *the* European meeting of opensource projects, mostly held by communities but also corporations like nokia, sun or google....

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Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) today announced that Elevation Partners has agreed to make an additional $100 million equity investment in Palm. This should allow Palm to continue the development of its products for 2009.

If you have a Nokia S60 or Windows Mobile smartphone, go ahead and download the new version of Google Maps by visiting google.com/gmm on your phone. Enjoy the (street) view!

Microsoft has informed some of its partners that it has had to delay Windows Mobile 7, a much anticipated update to its cell phone operating system. Although Microsoft has not publicly said when to expect Windows Mobile 7, partners who had expected to have a final release in their hands by early next year have been told now that it won't be ready until the second half of next year, sources told CNET News.

Worldwide smartphone sales totalled 32.2 million units in the second quarter of 2008, a 15.7 per cent increase from the second quarter of 2007, according to Gartner, Inc. In addition, of all mobile device sales, smartphones' share remained stable at 11 percent. Symbian OS is still far ahead of competition but looses almost 9% market share.

London, UK – 10 September 2008 – Sony Ericsson today announces 30 September 2008 as the official launch date for the Xperia X1 – initially available to consumers in the UK, Germany and Sweden. The handset will be available in other markets across Europe, Asia and Latin America throughout Q4 2008.