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.

"The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokia's greater concentration in retail and distributors' sales, saw Nokia destock more than nine million units overall and five million smartphones, helping it hold on to its position as the leading smartphone manufacturer by volume," said Roberta Cozza, a principal research analyst at Gartner in a press release. "However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokia's channel is pretty lean."

One surprising note from Gartner's numbers show that, by operating system, Microsoft Windows Phone (or Windows Mobile CE, if any of them still exist in stock somewhere) sold 1.7 million units worldwide. That is disconcerting if you are a member of the Windows Phone team in Redmond. Samsung's also-ran operating system, Bada, which almost nobody in the United States knows about, outperformed Windows Phone with 2.05 million units sold, which is a 75% gain from the 577,000 it sold in Q2 2010. Microsoft's phone share has declined from 4.9% of Q2 2010 sales to 1.6% in Q2 2011.

Basically, the Nokia Windows Phone really needs to come out soon, especially in time for the holiday season.

By volume, BlackBerry actually increased sales from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011 from 11.6 million to 12.6 million sold. Yet, with sales of smartphones increasing, Research In Motion's market share went down from 18.7% to 11.7%. RIM is still the sixth largest phone manufacturer in the world and holds a 3% market share of all devices sold (including feature phones). It was jumped by ZTE for the fifth spot by about a half-million devices. Apple is fourth with 4.6% while Samsung trails only Nokia at 16.3%.

Activity streams, cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are among those at that peak. Gartner defines this as a "phrase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections." And although according to Gartner's map, it means these technologies may be on their way to mainstream, the next stop is one of disillusionment because those technologies failed to live up to expectations.

Gartner's report examines 1800 technologies as well as trends in 75 industry and topic areas. These reports are meant to provide a snapshot into emerging technologies. as well as estimates in the time until these technologies become mainstream. Cloud computing and e-readers, according to the report will be mainstream in less than 5 years, but we have to look beyond the five year mark for mainstream 3D printing and robots.

Gartner identifies several themes from the Hype Cycle report, including the importance of UI, data-driven decision-making, and cloud computing.

Bonus: What Does the Mobile, Touch-Friendly Web Look Like Today?

The mobile web, according to a new report from mobile search engine Taptu, is currently all about shopping and services. Taptu - which specializes in indexing mobile sites - surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for mobile, finger-friendly browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu's "shopping and services" category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites.

According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company's index, followed by sites in the "photo and design" category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%. Personal blogs only make up 1.5% of Taptu's index, a number if is easily bested by adult sites, which account for 3% of all mobile-optimized sites.

It's worth noting that if we combine news and weather sites (3.3%) together with sites about world affairs (8.1%), this category would easily fall into Taptu's top 3.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

No one is spared by "the consultant":

"No one knows what is going on. Not even Gartner. Especially Gartner."

"CloudCamp is just a bunch of vendors getting pissed, eating pizza and comparing the size of their case studies."

"And what is this about Microsoft. They are considered to be one of the four big cloud providers and they are about as cloudy as Steve Ballmer is cool."

It goes on. it does strike a chord. The hype about cloud computing is so ripe for satire. Almost as much as social media - which apparently was the inspiration for this sketch.

The cloud consultant makes his point pretty well about the state of the cloud computing market. Hardly anyone is making any money. Have we not seen this before in our world of over charged tech enthusiasm?

In the meantime, according to the consultant, the only ones making a dime (barely) on cloud computing are a bookseller and a search engine.

"And maybe Salesforce," the consultant says. "And they were cloud before cloud was cloud." ;)

"The move to server-agnostic applications is still in its infancy but will soon have a major effect on enterprise computing. The legacy applications won't go away, even if the exciting stuff is being done on Internet-based apps, they said. But it won't stay that way. Today, 70 to 80 percent of corporate applications require Windows to run, but the Gartner analysts expect a tipping point in 2011, when the majority of these applications will be OS-agnostic, such as Web applications. "Sometime in the middle of the next decade, Windows will be playing a much less important role on the desktop," MacDonald said."
emphasis ours

This prediction ties in with the latest in Web Office thinking. I predicted in September 2005 that:

"...the time for the web-based office will come, mark my words. When broadband is ubiquitous, web functionality is richer, issues of security and reliability have been put to rest, and most importantly of all - when Corporates are ready to make the jump. It may be 5-10 years down the track, it may be longer."

I stand by that prediction today. In September 2006 Nicholas Carr had an even more specific prediction, saying that in "the early 2010s" we'll see "fully web-based suites".

2011 seems an optimistic prediction for web apps (and other OS-agnostic apps) to usurp Windows in the enterprise, but I'm certain it will be only 1-3 years after that before the cloud becomes the platform of choice for enterprise.

Pic: jurvetson