Nokia and Microsoft holding an event on August 17

It seems August 17 could be the day we see an official announcement regarding the first Nokia Windows Phone. Microsoft and Nokia are handing out invites to an event being held in Cologne on the said date, which does not go into the specifics of the event (apart from the fact that there will be a live act and a great DJ) although we do have reasons to believe Nokia will be announcing their new handset, particularly one running Windows Phone 7 Mango.

There will also be a raffle at the event, where the winners can get three of the Xbox 360 250GB consoles with Kinect and more importantly (for us, at least), three of the upcoming Nokia Windows Phone handsets as soon as they are available. This makes us even more confident in our assumption that there will in fact be a new Nokia Windows Phone announced that night. They say they will make it an evening to remember. We shall see.

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Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc and Xperia PLAY get software update

Sony Ericsson is pushing out an update for the Xperia Arc and the Xperia PLAY. It's a minor update, the Android version is still 2.3.3, but it brings a few useful changes like stereo sound in videos, landscape mode in the homescreen and a few others.

The homescreens of the Xperia Arc and the Xperia PLAY will both work in landscape mode after the update and there's a selection of new themes available as well. The other big change is the sound in videos - both switch from mono to stereo sound (other parameters of the videos are unchanged).

Next up is DLNA support so you can play media from DLNA-enabled devices. Finally, there's xLoud, which improves the performance of the loudspeaker when playing music.

The availability of the update depends on the market and your operator - to check for the update, you can go to Settings > About > Software update. Or you can use Sony Ericsson's PC Companion to update your Arc or Play.

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24 percent of Android users now on Gingerbread

According to Google’s latest report based on the number of Android devices that have accessed Android Market within a 14-day period till August 1, 24.3 percent of Android users are now running on Gingerbread-based devices. Froyo, however, continues to have the majority of the stake, with 55.9 percent of the total Android users. Although the adoption to Gingerbread by OEMs happened a lot faster compared to the previous versions it seems it’s not fast enough as a lot of users are still stuck on the older version.

Looking at the historical distribution from February 2011 to August 2011, we can see that Gingerbread user base only started picking up around May 2011. However, the Froyo user base remains almost identical to what it was in February, it’s just that the usage of the older versions such as 2.1 has dropped significantly.

Meanwhile, Android Honeycomb-based devices aren’t doing so well. With only 1.3 percent of the total Android users who access the Market there clearly aren’t enough Android Honeycomb-based tablets out there, despite being in existence for almost six months now.

Another interesting statistic is the number of Android users with a specific display size/pixel density. According to the data collected in a 7-day period ending August 1, of users who accessed the Android Market, 74.5 percent of them are using a device with Normal / hdpi display. According to Google, Normal can be a display ranging from 3.0 – 5.0-inch in size and hdpi is anywhere between 180 to 280 dpi. This is not unexpected due to the popularity of phones with around 4-inch displays and 800 x 480 resolution. The second highest user base is for Normal / mdpi, which is 16.9 percent. mdpi is between 130 to 180 dpi, which will mostly include phones with around 3.2 - 3.5-inch display sizes with HVGA resolution. Once again we can see devices with xlarge displays (7 – 10-inch) are only 1.2 percent.

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Apple largest smartphone manufacturer in the world

According to the latest report by the International Data Corporation Apple is now the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer.

Apple shipped 20.3 million iPhones by Q2, 2011, up by 141.1 percent from last year’s 8.4 million and its international market share now stands at 19.1 percent compared to 13 percent last year. Samsung, meanwhile, showed the most progress, with shipments reaching 17.3 million, a staggering 380.6 percent leap from last year’s 3.6 million and now commands 16.2 percent of the market.

Both of them ousted Nokia and RIM from their number one and two positions, with the former recording a 30% drop in shipment, dropping down to number three and RIM, despite shipping slightly more units than last year, not able to keep up with the others and falling down to number four.

HTC did rather well too but had to settle for the number five position. The second most popular smartphone maker in the US managed to ship 11.7 million units worldwide, up by a healthy 165.9 percent, with 11 percent of the total market share. Brands such as LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson along with several others occupy the remaining 26.4 percent of the market.

This again proves that although Android is the most popular OS, Apple is still the most popular smartphone manufacturer. However with the rate at which Samsung is growing, Apple with its lone iPhone, won’t be able to keep up for long.

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