TECHNOLOGY

Gartner's third quarter report for 2012 released on Thursday showed that South Korean tech firm LG remained in fifth place in overall global mobile phone sales by vendors.

To ensure growth and carving for Australia a bigger niche in the multibillion-dollar global industry, Australian Arts Minister Simon Crean announced on Thursday the creation of the Australian Interactive Games Fund.

Nokia badly needs a lifeline, research firm Gartner said on its latest report, which showed that the Lumia 920 maker crashed out from the coveted list of the top five biggest smartphone makers in the world.

BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion (RIM), is frantic but confident in conquering the world consumer market as the struggling company readies its new handsets topbilled as the new Blackberry 10.

Small footprint and easy on the hand (but not necessarily on the pocket) easily land the iPad Mini on everyone’s shopping list, plus of course the excitement that gradually built up on the gadget prior to its unveiling last month by Apple.

Much of the world barely noticed but yes Apple actually released the iPad 4 alongside with the iPad Mini a few weeks ago and it has generated enough buzz, at least for those paying keen attention.

Anyone who has a mobile phone probably owned at least one Motorola unit in his lifetime. Motorola used to be the global leader in mobile phone sales in the 1990s until Nokia, Apple and Samsung stepped up their game and caused Motorola sales to plummet. Based in Schaumburg, Illinois, Motorola lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, which caused the company to be divided into two independent units, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions.

The Android dominates the global smartphone market. A recently released Gartner report found that for the third quarter of 2012, Android comprised 72.4 per cent of mobile sales worldwide.

Three million units sold so far and counting – that’s the measure of success attached with the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which later on this month will be challenged by HTC’s Droid DNA and other phablets in the months and quarters ahead.

Expectations run high for the latest Call of Duty game franchise, the Black Ops 2, according to analysts, because previous releases of the Activision pedigree had delivered hundreds of millions in revenues within 24 hours of reaching global store shelves.

The Big Apple hosted the recent U.S. launch of the latest smartphone flavour from Taiwan-based HTC, the Droid DNA, which Verizon has picked up to become its latest Android mobile device.

For the Friday, Nov 16, release of the HTC One X+, AT&T started to take pre-orders for what is considered now the captain of the HTC football team. HTC is counting on the expansion of its HTC One series through the extra affordable unit, to boost its position in the global marketplace for smartphone.

What is there to gripe about the Google Nexus 4? It is powerful thanks to the quad-core Snapdragon processor that clocks at a peak speed of 1.4GHz and brandishes the native version of Android Jellybean.

Activision’s ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 2’ will hit global store shelves on Nov 13 and this early the highly-anticipated game title is projected to quickly breach the $1 billion mark, easily breaking the record sales set in 2011 by its immediate CoD predecessor.

With the speculated roll out of HTC Droid DNA, 5-inch devices such as Samsung's Galaxy Note II face a challenge in the marketplace. All eyes are in New York City if HTC and Verizon will confirm leaks of the Droid DNA, reportedly bearing some similarity to the HTC J Butterfly model announced in Japan several weeks ago.

The Surface tablet has been moving modestly so far, Microsoft said on Monday, hastening to add that the overall push for the Windows RT version of the gadget has encountered minimal glitches.

After more than two years of reign, a rival tablet appears to be gathering enough steam that tech experts seem convinced an iPad killer is now on the horizon.

After topping smartphone sales the past three quarters in effect taking away the smartphone crown from Apple, South Korean tech firm Samsung is now threatening to also dislodge the California-based company from its top spot in the tablet market.

Google’s design for the Nexus 10 is for the tablet to serve as a seminal device for Android developers, spurring them to author more apps that are specifically optimised for tablet owners.

Windows 8-powered devices are hip and cool, Microsoft would want us to believe, and to help the tech giant get this message across, to be absorbed and embraced by global consumers, it decides to employ the services of A-list celebrities.

Speed enthusiasts would be happy to know that top chipmaker Intel just launched a new processor called Itanium 9500 series which belongs to 64-bit family. According to Intel, the new processor offers up to 2.4 times performance scaling and 33 per cent faster Input and output speed versus its previous generation.

Samsung reigned supreme in the past three quarters of 2012 as the Best-Selling SmartPhone Manufacturer. IDC said the firm sold 56.3 million smartphones compared to Apple's 26.9 million units. Latest figure from Samsung showed that the company sold over 30 million Galaxy S III smartphones in the past five months. The model is Samsung's flagship unit.

Smart devices will be the norm of the future with three dominant platforms – Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows – all competing to meet the mobile computing demands of general and business consumers, a new report said.

Samsung leads the pack this time as reports emerged that rivals of the Asian tech giant have decided to counter the success of its Galaxy Note phablet, already on a second iteration that further stretched the device’s screen size, with of courses more potent specs.

Microsoft’s Surface RT has commenced hitting the road and results returned so far on numerous test drives strongly suggest that the gadget is not as confusing as thought earlier by Apple CEO Tim Cook, without of course the benefit of hand-on experience.

To indicate the growing use of Instagram among social networking sites, in the Tuesday election in the U.S., over 100,000 photos taken with the photo application was tagged with #iVoted and 150,000 with #election2012.

Since the launch of Apple's iPad Mini in 34 countries, combined sales of the device and the iPad fourth generation averaged 1 million units daily in the past three days.

While the role of Facebook and Twitter in helping elect and celebrate the Wednesday poll victory of U.S. President Barack Obama has once more been emphasised, the newbie social networking site Google+ appears quiet and out of the political equation.

These days, Chinese brand Lenovo is touted as the next big thing in the personal computer business, threatening the hold to precarious lead of familiar names like Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell and Acer.