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Netflix today announced a new user interface for all Android tablets, including both the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook. The interface displays twice as many movies to place in the user queue and is generally a better looking app than it was before. Yet, does the new UI solve some of Netflix's problems with search and discovery on tablet devices?

Research firm Gartner has come out with its third quarter global mobile sales numbers and overall, the industry grew 5.6% from the same period last year. About 440.5 million cellphones were sold, with 115 million of those being of the smart variety, a 42% growth rate from Q3 2010 but only 7% growth from Q2 2011. The feature phone market is being buoyed by emerging markets while most of the smartphone growth was in Russia and China. Many other markets have stalled in smartphone growth.

Gartner says the slowdown of smartphone growth in markets such as the United States and Western Europe was due to consumers waiting for flagship devices to be released, such as the newest iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Rezound. Nokia is still No. 1 in the world in overall sales while another study shows that the best selling single devices in the U.S. are Apple's variety of iPhones.

Apple had a great month in the new app department, mostly spurred by the release of the iPhone 4S and all the iOS5-based applications that developers have been working on throughout the summer. Android also had an interesting month for new apps but the real intriguing flood will come whenever Ice Cream Sandwich becomes widely adopted and, finally, we can start adding real Android tablets apps to our apps of the month column. Check out the selections for October 2011 below. We again brought back the updates portion of the column, with a list at the bottom of important app updates users should be aware of. Check it out below.

The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.

We've written here before in ReadWriteWeb about the bad side of Android platform diversity: multiple phone manufacturers with one or more carriers apiece, simultaneously supporting more than one active version of the operating system. One can't help but think that Microsoft has handled Windows platform transitions better than this, but then again, Windows doesn't have to appease the interests of carriers and manufacturers.

Now, an intensive 12-month study by mobile communications analysis firm WDS Global has come up with a quantifiable metric for the cumulative effects of platform fragmentation on carriers, and subsequently on consumers, based on estimates of 2011 Android smartphone shipments: The frustration from customers who have been unable to resolve their hardware and software issues through customer support, and end up returning their phones for replacement, ends up costing U.S. carriers a combined total of $2 billion annually.

The perception among younger adults is that everybody owns a smartphone. When numbers like 50% of U.S. cellphone owners have apps, the reaction inevitably comes, "only 50%?" It is easy for adults, say those from 25-44 years old, to forget that there is a significant portion of the U.S. population that does not own cellphones, let alone those of the smart variety. Mobile penetration in the United States is at 77%, which lags behind many other developed countries.

Nielsen came out with its third quarter mobile numbers today and the demographics are intriguing. The reason that young people feel like everybody has smartphones is because they do. 62% of people 25-34 years old have smartphones. Of all cellphones in the U.S., 43% of them are smart.

Cloud printing vendor Electronics for Imaging (EFI) announces today a new PrintMe Mobile version. The only issue is why has it taken so long to get printing to these smartphones and tablets?

Companies and consumers trying to decide which mobile/smartphone OS to adopt might want to look over Michael DeGusta's Android support history chart. DeGusta paints a sad story indeed, demonstrating that no Android phone has consistently received timely OS updates over its lifecycle. In fact, some phones have never been current at all, shipping with Android releases that were two major versions behind, and never receiving updates.

Nokia phones are not coming to the United States this year but when they do in 2012 it will be a series of devices differentiated by from carrier to carrier. According to Chris Weber, the head of Nokia's North American operation, there are some tricky obstacles to rolling out in the U.S. and Nokia is working with the cellular operators to bring unique Windows Phone devices to each.

When Stephen Elop said that the U.S. would have a "product portfolio" at the end of the Nokia World keynote, what he really meant was that each device at each U.S. individual carrier will be different. Think of it in the same guise that Samsung takes with its original Galaxy S series - ubiquitous and everywhere.

Founder of 4Chan, Chris Poole, aka moot, gave a particularly strong talk at Web 2.0 Expo, in which he asserted that Facebook and Google were doing it wrong, and that they should emulate Twitter's stance on identity.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Mobile, App Stores and Identity - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

The folks at Good Technology have released their latest report analyzing the trends in tablet and smartphone activations using their software, and the results show a trend towards greater Android adoption in corporations, although a still overwhelming use of Apple devices. We last covered these reports from Good here earlier this year.