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"Conflict minerals," those mined to support groups conducting armed conflict or engaging in human rights abuses, have been an issue since long before we first wrote about it in July of 2010. The mineral equivalent of blood diamonds, they include tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold, all of which are used to manufacture our electronics.

Nokia, the world's largest manufacturers of mobile phones, today published its policy on conflict minerals.

Update after the jump.

Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter to adopt the Windows Phone operating system, according to Nokia's fourth-quarter earnings report released Thursday.

That was the first in a series of so-called "platform support" payments believed to eventually total billions of dollars. To date, Microsoft and Nokia have been quiet about the deal's specifics, perhaps because it appears as if Microsoft is paying Nokia significantly less than its paying other cellphone manufacturers.

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.

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.

If you happen to be in Manhattan in the near future, head over to 34th Street Herald Square and take note of the giant Windows Phone that has taken up residence there. It is huge. It is also a perfect representative of what Microsoft is willing to do to push Windows Phone on the public.

There have been concerts, shows and even a marriage proposal in the six-story Windows Phone in the middle of Manhattan. It is gaudy Microsoft marketing at its best (anybody remember the ProjectNatal/Kinect announcement?) and will be one of the first signs of wave of marketing coming from both Microsoft and Nokia. How will much will this matter for Windows Phone going forward?

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.

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.

The much-anticipated Nokia Windows Phones are coming this year ... if you live outside the United States. Nokia announced its two Lumia devices today at Nokia World 2011 in London and said that the devices will be almost immediately available in most Western European countries and in Asian-Pacific countries sometime later in November. Yet, the Lumia devices will be announced with a new "product portfolio" in the U.S. in early 2012.

What gives, Nokia? The product release schedule sounds a lot like the Nokia of old. The one that hardly exists in North America smartphones. We know that Nokia is counting on the U.S. market to bolster its hype cycle for the new Lumia devices and that phone makers and Microsoft are going to throw huge marketing dollars behind it. If there are Nokia Windows Phones ready to ship from the factory in Finland, how can the company justify missing the lucrative U.S. holiday shopping season?