iPhone

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'

Nexus One. That's the name of the long-awaited, much-hyped, overspeculated Google phone that is coming to market. In what appears to be a deliberate leak, Google employees started tweeting during the weekend about testing a new Android-based mobile device.

The tweets were followed by a Google Mobile Blog post. In the blog, Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management for Google, explained the search giant's "dogfooding" concept, the process of employees testing products for feedback, and suggestions that will improve a product.

Apple could be selling up to twice as many iPhones if it weren't bound to exclusive contracts with wireless carriers, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Kathryn Huberty.

In a research note, Huberty said Apple could see its iPhone market share rise to an average of 10 percent in the top six iPhone markets if it signed agreements with multiple carriers to sell the popular device. The iPhone currently has four percent of the smartphone market.

In a move to compete with Apple's iPhone and iPod, Sony may develop a hybrid cell phone-video game handheld with the PlayStation Portable device at its core.

The Nikkei business daily on Saturday reported that the Japanese electronics maker is looking for ways to regain its dominance in the portable electronics market. Sony introduced the Walkman 30 years ago, but Apple has overtaken the entertainment company since the rise of the MP3 format. A PSP phone may be a competitive solution.

The bad news for the mobile-device industry is that its sales in the first quarter were horrible. The good news is that smartphone sales are showing strength.

Those are some of the takeaways from a report by industry researcher Gartner released Wednesday. The report indicated that worldwide mobile-phone sales in the first quarter of this year were down 8.6 percent to 269.1 million units compared to the same quarter last year. But smartphone sales, which were 13.5 percent of all mobile-device sales, were up 12.7 percent.

Shares of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. soared more than 20 percent in after-hours trading Thursday after the company said its profit jumped in its fiscal fourth quarter, surpassing analysts' expectations. Solid demand for smart phones despite the recession helped boost results.

The company said it earned $518.3 million, or 90 cents per share, for the quarter ended Feb. 28. That was up 26 percent from the year-earlier period.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected a profit of 84 cents per share.

While Apple develops turn-by-turn GPS navigation features for the iPhone, one company has shown it can be done. Sygic, based in Bratislava, a region in southwest Slovakia, displayed its mobile GPS application for the iPhone 3G Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The company offered meetings to business partners leading up to the event to show them its Sygic Mobile app for the iPhone 3G and smartphones with Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems.

Apple's publicity nightmare keeps growing worse. The latest twist is more serious than dropped calls or lost e-mail -- it's a security flaw in the iPhone that could dial up trouble for users.

The flaw isn't a new issue. Apple first addressed what is known as the passcode flaw last January. The fix prevented unauthorized users from circumventing the password-protected locking feature in an early version of the software. But the problem has reemerged in new versions of the iPhone software.

A month after Apple launched its App Store online, the iPhone-maker is reporting eye-popping results.

Users have downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Even though most of those applications are free, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the Journal his company sold an average of $1 million a day in applications. That's a whopping $30 million in the first month.

The Apple iPhone will account for 6.3 million of the 18.1 million touchscreen phones sold in the U.S. this year, for an impressive 35 percent market share, according to Strategy Analytics.

"We expect the release of the heavily subsidized 3G iPhone 2.0 on July 11th to catalyze a healthy spurt in touchscreen volumes during the second half of the year," said Strategy Analytics analyst Bonny Joy.