ReadWriteWeb

Tablet computers running Android have collectively begun to challenge the dominance of Apple's iPad, stealing 20% of the iPad's market share in the last year, according to ABI Research.

While no individual tablet, be it the Motorola Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab, comes close to challenging the iPad directly, all Android-based tablets combined are gaining fast on Apple's ever-popular offering.

A couple of niche Android blogs have surfaced what they claim to be pictures and features belonging to the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, Android's latest iteration of its operating system. For the most part, Ice Cream Sandwich appears to have general user interfaces updates and tweaks. That could be beneficial to Android as it will allow older devices to run the new version and help aim Google towards the ultimate goal for the platform and Ice Cream Sandwich specifically, putting an end to Android fragmentation.

New features coming to Ice Cream Sandwich include a new app drawer, a new theme for the Gmail app, the Google Shopper app that will work with NFC-capable devices, an embeddable Google search bar (a la Honeycomb) and a revamped notifications tray. One of the biggest questions, through, is: When will Ice Cream Sandwich to be ready and can it beat the iPhone 5 to market?

Android users can now watch movies they've rented from the Android Market right on their phones, thanks to an update to the company's Videos app.

The Videos app will play rented movies on smart phones running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or 2.3 (Gingerbread). It should work on more than 80% of Android handsets, according to Google's statistics.

Research firm Gartner has released its study of second quarter global mobile sales and, to the surprise of no one, Android and Apple are dominating the smartphone market. Globally, smartphone sales were near 107.7 million, of which Android was the top performer (43.4% on sales of 46.7 million units) and iOS was third (18.2% on sales of 19.6 million). Between the two, they accounted for 62% of smartphone sales worldwide.

Nokia's Symbian is still clinging to the leader board, with 22.1% of the smartphone market on 23.8 million units sold. That is way down from Nokia's high when it controlled nearly 48% of the world smartphone market. Overall, Nokia is still the world's largest cell phone manufacturer, having sold 97.8 million devices in the quarter, good for 22.8% of the market. Yet, Gartner does not see Nokia's lead lasting into the third quarter and beyond.

In an interesting interview with VentureBeat yesterday, Chris Weber, the president of Nokia and head of its North America operations, gave some insight into Nokia's strategy to regain its dominance in the smartphone market. While withholding specifics about the hardware or the timeframe, Weber discussed Nokia's vision of mobile software, calling the interfaces and app-based models of Android and iOS "outdated."

Nokia plans to fight back against the other two dominant platforms with its next generation of smartphones, which will run Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system. The company is phasing out its once-dominant smartphone lines from the U.S. market in preparation. Windows Phone OS is a natural choice for Nokia to distinguish its phones from the leading competitors because its underlying structure is different. Whereas Android and iOS are built around navigating between different applications, Windows Phone 7 arranges everything around your contacts. And there's something to that idea; it is a phone, after all.

News360, a news reader app available on most mobile devices and tablets, has just announced version 2.0, which adds a layer of personalization to the news shown to each user, whereas it was just an aggregator before. The update also launches a beta Web version of the service, so you can use it on the desktop. Finally, the new version adds a timeline view, which allows you to track a story's development over time.

When News360 launched, it simply pulled in coverage of stories from multiple sources, like Google News does, as well as Twitter discussions of the topic. It offered a few ways for users to go more in-depth, with image galleries, great definitions of terms and the ability to manually add more personalized feeds by topic. It certainly provided more content than a human-curated service, like Newsy, but it lacked that human quality of editorial discernment. The new personalization layer in News360 is still automated, but it harnesses the user's own human qualities.

Google has announced that App Inventor for Android, a do-it-yourself tool for building Android applications with no programming skills required, has been put out to pasture. As the company phases out Google Labs, its public test bed for Web app experiments, some Labs projects have been called up to the major leagues. Android App Inventor wasn't so lucky.

This is not the end of the line for App Inventor, though. "Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code," the announcement says. "Additionally, because of App Inventor's success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform."

Google will soon release a new version of the Google Search app for Android with some handy user experience improvements. The app will group suggestions by content type, with Web search results at the top. It will also offer country-specific suggestions and results for all international Google domains. It adds several new gestures for editing or removing search history items. The overall interface has been simplified, and performance has been smoothed out.

Google published the announcement on their Google Mobile blog, but it has since been removed, and the update is not yet live. We will update when the app is released.

The mobile industry issues anti-malware solutions to secure popular mobile platforms almost as an afterthought. But, what is it doing to explicitly address security early on, such as with the SDKs developers use to write mobile applications? Leviathan Security Group's David Kane-Parry, who regularly presents on mobile security was kind enough to update me. I gave the top four mobile vendors opportunity to chime in as well, and some did.

In our continuing tradition of rounding up new mobile application releases we found interesting and/or exciting over the past month, we present you with this new list of apps for July 2011. This month, we found a lot of great new iPhone apps, some Android and tablet apps, and a bunch of "notable" application updates.

As always, share your thoughts on those we missed in the comments below.