ReadWriteMobile

If there were any uncertainty that Google's acquisition of Motorola would be approved by regulatory agencies across the world, one only has to look at the fourth quarter of 2011 to see why it never was in danger. The last quarter of 2011 showed us which companies really control the smartphone market and Motorola was certainly not one of them. Between Apple and Samsung, the two behemoths controlled 95% of mobile phone profits worldwide, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley.

The pincer formation at the top of the ecosystem means that no regulatory agency can deny Google its $12.5 billion purchase. Life has also become extremely difficult for all the other OEMs and mobile platforms trying to make a dent in the market. If you are not making an iDevice or some type of Galaxy product, Apple and Samsung are squeezing you out of the market. The clock is ticking.

The long evolution of Tizen continues and is about to get its biggest boost yet. Samsung is going to merge its Bada platform with the Tizen project, bringing the Linux-based operating system to more smartphones and developers across the world.

Tizen is the Linux smartphone operating system that was once called MeeGo that, in turn, was once the confluence of Maemo and Moblin from Nokia and Intel. Nothing tangible has ever really come out of the Tizen/MeeGo project except for a few demo phones and the Nokia N9 and N950. With Samsung throwing its manufacturing weight behind the Tizen development project, that may be about to change.

A little more than a year after Windows Phone 7 was launched to the world, the ecosystem is seeing some strong growth from Windows Phone Marketplace. According to a new report by Distimo shows that the Windows Phone Marketplace has downloads of 101,000 free applications per day and 20,000 paid applications. The Windows 7 Marketplace is 39 times smaller than the Apple App Store volume.

The App Store is about 12.5 times larger than the Windows Phone Marketplace (500,000 apps to 40,000). The iOS user base is mammoth in in comparison to WP7, with northwards of 200 million devices sold against the abysmal numbers for Windows Phone (2 million devices shipped into the channel in Q3 2011). The Nokia Lumia might help WP7 along globally but the Marketplace has almost reached a point where it can support a vibrant user base in the same way as iOS and Android.

Microsoft is known to pay a developer ecosystem to stay loyal to its platforms and products. That has become no different with Windows Phone. On the other end, Nokia has a worldwide base of developers that are very loyal to the device maker, especially in emerging markets. The question remains though, can Nokia and Microsoft capture the hearts and minds of regular developers that would normally focus on iOS and Android? That is the question for this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

The last two days at Nokia World 2011 were spent trying to figure out how Nokia CEO Stepehen Elop could justify his claim that his company's Windows Phone is, in fact, "the first real Windows Phone." From a marketing and merchandise perspective, it is not. If we take Nokia's value added services into account, Elop may have a point but there is still a lot of work to do.

The Nokia Lumia 800 is a beautiful phone. It feels nice to hold and has all the tech specs that gadget geeks would expect from a top of the line smartphone (except for a forward facing camera). The big question has been whether Nokia's implementation of Windows Phone is any better than LG, Samsung or HTC. The answer remains to be seen.

The Nokia developer forum has been taken offline after a breach from malicious hackers, according to the company. During Nokia's investigation they discovered that the forum database table containing developers' email addresses and in some cases personal information had been exploited by an SQL injection. The hack is bigger than Nokia had previously thought, leading to the forum's take-down.

Currently, the Nokia developer forum registers a "404 Not Found" return, meaning that Nokia system administrators have taken the entire forum off their servers. In an email to developers, Nokia stated that "the initial vulnerability was addressed immediately, we have now taken the developer community website offline as a precautionary measure, while we conduct further investigations and security assessments."

This week, Nokia's North American president Chris Weber went on a bit of a press tour to tout the upcoming Nokia Windows Phone 7 release. He told AllThingsD that the much-anticipated Nokia N9, based on MeeGo, will probably never reach U.S. shores and that Symbian would get phased out of the entire North American market.

No U.S. denizens are going to miss Symbian. The lack of traction by Nokia's smartphone system in the U.S. doomed it, with iOS and Android the final nails in the coffin. Yet, in a stop at VentureBeat, Weber said that the reliance of Android and iOS on the native app is "outdated." Weber was not specifically talking about HTML5 mobile Web applications but rather the "hubs and tiles" theme of Windows Phone 7. Later in the week, Amazon released its popular Kindle application to the mobile browser (Safari on iOS for now) with the HTML5 Kindle Cloud Reader, avoiding the draconian rules of Apple's App Store. Perhaps there is a trend here. Between the Windows Phone approach and the supposed coming wave of HTML5 web-based apps, is the native application soon to be "outdated?" That is the topic of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

It's almost unbelievable, but it's true. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has been caught on video asking a crowd to put away their cameras and turn off their recording devices because he's about to show something top secret and he doesn't want it to hit the blogosphere. Oops!

Apparently, what he showed was a device code-named "Sea Ray" - and it's Nokia's first Windows Phone!

At Nokia's Connection event in Singapore, the handset manufacturer unveiled its first (and last) MeeGo-based phones, the N9 and its developer counterpart, the N950. The N9, once representative of Nokia's vision for its smartphone future, the heir apparent to Nokia's Symbian, is now just a model of "what could have been."

Too bad it's so gorgeous then.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop appeared onstage at Qualcomm's Uplinq developer conference in San Diego this morning to talk about his five-point strategy which he believes will make Nokia's mobile ecosystem the most compelling of the top three: iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The mobile industry is shifting from a device-versus-device battle to a battle of ecosystems, Elop explained. And Nokia believes that partnering with Microsoft was its best choice to remain a leader in the new landscape.