Research firm Strategy Analytics today announced its estimates of the global smartphone market for the fourth quarter of 2011, finding that Apple narrowly squeezed by Samsung to retake the title of world's largest smartphone vendor as measured by unit shipments. According to Strategy Analytics' numbers, Apple's 37 million iPhones narrowly eclipsed Samsung's quarterly smartphone shipments of 36.5 million units. Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “While Apple took the top spot in smartphones on a quarterly basis, Samsung became the market leader in annual terms for the first time with 20 percent global share during 2011

Not even the two outgoing CEOs of RIM would argue that the company's ill-fated BlackBerry PlayBook tablet was a success. In fact, as far as tech flops go we'd argue that it's right up there with the HP TouchPad.

In a move which is sure to draw comparisons to the Cydia store which exists on jailbroken iOS devices; tablets and phones running the Android operating system are set to get an unofficial application store which will be home to all of the applications which have been rejected or banned by Google, as well as modifications and custom ROMs. The iOS App Store is notorious for being tightly monitored by Apple, with the Cupertino company having the last say over what gets accepted for sale. Finding software which is available for Android devices outside of the official marketplace has never been..

If the speculation is to be believed, then Apple has plans in place to adopt and support the new 802.11ac specification across Airport base stations, Time Capsules, Apple TV, Notebooks and potentially the company’s range of mobile devices. Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com

The third party application store, Cydia, has achieved phenomenal success in the relatively short time it has been existence. Obviously, the success of any sales platform is predominantly down to these consumers who use it day in and day out, without those people who require additional tweaks and utilities on their devices, it simply wouldn't exist.

In the past 5 years, Apple's push into the enterprise has been led by the iPhone and the iPad. Corporate IT departments, long dominated by the BlackBerry, are becoming more receptive to iOS products, especially when users are given the choice about which platform to use. In addition to iOS driving up Apple's sales -- accounting for some two-thirds of Apple's revenue in fact -- iOS's corporate success is driving enterprise adoption of the Mac.

I can remember getting the original iPhone in 2007, powering it up for the first time and being blown away by the native YouTube application which came bundled into the iPhone OS, as it was known at the time. I had never been a big user of the video sharing service, but the convenience provided by having it on a device which I carried around with me all the time made me start using it a lot more

The development scene within the iOS jailbreak community tends to be made up of two sets of developers.

So here we are, the last day of my look into the future. A look at what the big boys of the smartphone world will be doing, as well as what I think they should be doing, throughout 2012

CNET yesterday reported that Verizon has announced a "hard requirement" that all future smartphones released on the carrier support 4G LTE technology for faster data speeds. That requirement has naturally led to speculation that the carrier has all but confirmed that the iPhone 5 will support LTE, which had already been widely assumed and rumored. Verizon's statement does, however, come with a minor catch, as there will reportedly be occasional exceptions to the LTE requirement, although those exceptions seem to be planned for the carrier's push-to-talk business