Current Analysis Inc

Motorola is placing two new bets on the open-source Android operating system with the release of its Backflip and Devour smartphones. The uniquely designed Backflip began selling through AT&T Wireless late last week, and the Detour is now available from Verizon Wireless.

The 3G/Wi-Fi Backflip, at $99 after rebate and with a two-year contract, is gaining a lot of attention for its unique flip-out QWERTY keyboard, which AT&T has described as "an original reverse flip design."

Big Selling Point -- MOTOBLUR

Apple ran its first iPad commercial during the Academy Awards on Sunday night. The 30-second advertisement shows the tablet computer sitting on an unidentified man's lap as he whisks through the features and functions in veteran style.

Nokia is making Skype available for the Symbian platform. A joint announcement Wednesday by the world's largest handset maker and the maker of the most popular VoIP calling software means that owners of select Nokia devices will be able to make phone calls over Wi-Fi or a mobile data connection at a fraction of the cost for normal calls.

Users of both the iPhone and Android platforms are avid application users, but iPhone owners buy more apps. That's one of several conclusions about mobile users in the January 2010 Mobile Metrics Report from AdMob.

The mobile advertising network found that Android and iPhone consumers download approximately the same number of apps, and spend about the same amount of time using them. But about 50 percent of iPhone users buy at least one app per month, while only 21 percent of Android users do.

'Sheer Quantity and Variety'

Mobile-phone sales worldwide headed up at the end of last year, according to a new report from industry research firm Gartner. Sales in the fourth quarter posted a 8.3 percent increase compared to a year ago, although overall 2009 sales dropped 0.9 percent.

Gartner said the drivers pushing up sales are smartphones and low-end devices. Smartphone sales, said Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi, "continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009," up 41.1 percent over 2008 to 53.8 million units. For all of 2009, smartphone sales were up 23.8 percent.

What do you get when you combine 600 million searchers with 50 million daily tweets? A new Yahoo-Twitter tie-up. While consumer privacy organizations continue bashing Google about its Google Buzz service, Yahoo and Twitter are partnering on a more benign social-networking play -- content sharing.

Now that Apple's iPad has launched, what can you do with it? What kind of new and existing applications will we see on this new Apple product line? Apple has released an updated software development kit with an iPad simulator to encourage developers to create new applications or revised versions of existing ones.

At a time when everything -- even Bluetooth headsets -- is becoming a platform for third-party applications, Amazon.com has decided to make its Kindle e-reader part of the crowd. On Thursday, the online retail giant said it's encouraging developers to build and upload content to the Kindle Store and promised a Kindle software development kit (SDK) soon.

Google's Nexus One smartphone, which grabbed the spotlight recently among the wave of new devices based on its open-source Android operating system, sold an estimated 20,000 units in its first week. That sales estimation by a company that tracks applications is being interpreted by some industry observers as disappointing.

The number came from Flurry, which estimates new smartphones by tracking more than 10,000 third-party applications in more than 25 million end-user sessions each day.

'Pretty Uninspiring Stuff'

Google's Nexus One "superphone" was highly anticipated, but now some observers are calling it overhyped. Less than a week after the monumental announcement that some thought would change the wireless industry, the Nexus One is getting more complaints than praise. At least the complaints are louder.