The trouble with being number one in any industry is that you have nowhere to move but down. Few companies know this better than Nokia (NOK), the Finnish telecommunications giant that has dominated cell phones for so long that in some parts of the globe the brand itself has become synonymous with the device. More

The iPhone's had a "free ride" on its patents since 2007, claims a Nokia lawsuit

Who can blame Nokia (NOK) if its nose is out of joint. The Finnish telecommunications giant is used to dominating the global cellphone market, and it still commands a 36.8% share, according to Gartner.

But that's down from 39.5% a year ago. Worse still, Nokia has been getting its clock cleaned by Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM) in smartphones, the fastest growing part of the business. Last week it reported a loss of $886 million as its smartphone share fell from 41% to 35% in the space of three months

So on Thursday it struck back, filing suit against Apple in a Delaware federal court claiming infringement on patents it holds on the integration of GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN — technologies at the heart of Apple's iPhone.

What's at stake, according to Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, is 1% to 2% of the cost of an iPhone, or in the worst case, about $12 per unit.

Nokia vice president Ilkka Rahnasto, in a prepared statement, put it more grandly:

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Daniel Eran Dilger finds anti-Apple bias in Gartner's research

"Looking into its crystal ball, Gartner Group has predicted that Google’s Android will become the second largest smartphone platform by 2012," writes Daniel Eran Dilger in the one-man blog he grandly calls Roughly Drafted Magazine. "Problem is, nobody’s talking about how terrible Gartner is at predicting things, or that Gartner’s 'research' has historically been paid for by special interests."

So begins Dilger's reaction to an interview with Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney that appeared Tuesday in Computerworld and was picked up uncritically by more than half a dozen tech websites.

Drawing on historical records and making generous use of internal Microsoft documents made public during antitrust proceedings, Dilger attacks not only Dulaney's numbers, but the credibility of the entire Gartner research group.

The result is a 1,700-word screed that may be the most thorough take-down of a tech industry analyst — and his employer — since Eliot Spitzer went after Henry Blodget.

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Company wants to make its Flash technology available everywhere — and that means penetrating mobile devices.

Flash is coming to most mobile phones - except the one that starts with "i." Image: Adobe

Flash is finally coming to your smartphone—and so is Adobe (ADBE). With today's launch of the newest version its software, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, the San Jose-based company is making an aggressive push to get its product onto any gadget that allows for web browsing–Blackberry devices, netbooks, increasingly even TVs.

Crucially, Adobe has signed on a number of key launch partners for the product including Google (GOOG) and Research in Motion (RIMM). By the first half of next year, consumers can expect Flash on nearly every smartphone operating system including Google’s Android, Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian, Palm’s (PALM) webOS and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile.

This is great for developers, who have long had to use different software to make their applications work on different devices. And it’s even better for consumers, for whom web browsing will get faster and more consistent regardless of the device. More

Source: AdMob

Apple (AAPL) now has a substantial — if not the largest — share of the smartphone market in every region of the world except Asia and Africa, according to a report issued Wednesday by AdMob.

Overall, the iPhone's worldwide share grew to 40% from 33% over the last six months. In North America, its share of the smartphone market is 52%, as measured by hits on AdMob's ads.

AdMob, which bills itself as the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, delivers ads displayed on smartphone screens, so its statistics tends to favor phones heavily used for Web surfing. "AdMob does not claim that this information will be necessarily representative of the mobile Web as a whole or of any particular country market," it warns at the bottom of the report. "AdMob’s traffic is driven by publisher relationships and may be influenced accordingly."

Among the report's other findings: More

Source: Gartner August 2009

Sales of Nokia's (NOK) Symbian smartphones are drifting. Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is gaining on RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry. Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile is still sinking. And the launch of the Palm (PALM) Pre barely made a ripple in the gobal smartphone market.

Those were the headlines from the smartphone portion of Gartner's 2009 Q2 mobile phone report, which saw smartphone sales grow 27% even as overall mobile phone sales, feeling recessionary pressure, fell 6%.

In this context, Apple was the clear winner. Its iPhone sales, as Gartner counts them, grew more than 500% year to year, and its market share, as we figure it, grew 375%. (See chart below the fold.)

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The PC maker widely rumored to be pursuing a phone for Chinese market. Is that a smart call?

Will Dell go mobile in China? Photo courtesy of Dell.

Will Dell (DELL) be able to get a smartphone off the ground in China?

The mobile world is abuzz once again over rumors that the No. 2 PC maker has plans to do just that. According to a Techcrunch report and an article on Chinese news portal 163.com, Dell may soon offer an "oPhone" device featuring Google's (GOOG) Android mobile operating system. The reports say the phone will be called the "mini3i."

OPhone is the name for China Mobile's customized version of Android, an open mobile operating platform. The phone reportedly is "iPhone like," with a touchscreen and no physical keypad. Dell is not commenting on the rumors. A spokesperson will only say: "Any mention of Dell in context with smartphones would be speculation." More

Source: iSuppli Corp.

Thanks in large part to Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and the growing ranks of iPhone imitators, worldwide sales of NAND-type flash memory are expected to rise nearly six-fold from 2008 to 2013, according to a report by iSuppli Corp. issued Wednesday.

Global revenue from sales of NAND flash for mobile phones could hit $932.5 million in 2013, according to iSuppli, up from $166.5 million in 2008 — a compound annual growth rate of 41.1%.

“NAND flash makers can thank Apple Inc. for starting this trend, with its iPhone models injecting new life into the memory market," writes Michael Yang, senior analyst for mobile and emerging memories at iSuppli. "However, with the introduction of the a new generation of ‘iPhone killers,’ multiple smartphone makers now are helping to drive NAND demand.”

Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones in its last fiscal quarter and is planning to introduce a version the phone in China. "This," says Yang, "will open up the market for the iPhone to a new potential audience of 1.3 billion people.”

Yang also credits Apple with raising the bar for how much memory manufacturers are expected to pack into their smartphones.

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The shrinking of the tech sector threatens creativity and new thinking

By Christopher Lochhead, strategy advisor and former chief marketing officer, Mercury Interactive

Is Silicon Valley at risk of becoming Detroit 2.0 — a company town dominated by a handful of big, uninspired conglomerates?

Lochhead advocates a mix of innovation and consolidation

Consolidation is replacing innovation as the hot strategy. During his company's battle for PeopleSoft, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared that the software industry has entered  a "period of contraction and consolidation."  

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophesy: Oracle has gobbled up at least a dozen more companies since it closed the PeopleSoft deal in 2005, and a big purchase of Sun Microsystems is pending. And other companies widely are expected to follow Oracle's acquisitive ways.

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