ReadWriteWeb

We've been as excited as everyone else about the iPhone 3G. But it's easy to forget that the iphone is just a tiny player in the mobile phone market. Even if it hits Steve Jobs' target of 10 million iphone sales by end of 2008, that will still be less than 1% of the mobile device market.

To put it into perspective, Nokia remains the world's biggest mobile handset maker with an estimated 40% of the market. Impressively Nokia has a very healthy lead over its competition. However if you look more closely, Nokia is slipping behind in the all-important Internet mobile device market.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Nokia's buyout of the open source mobile OS Symbian, reviewed a "memory augmentation" service and a semantic search engine, and looked at what LinkedIn's strategy tells us about the IPO market. On the trends side, we contributed our 2 cents to Yahoo's board, investigated another Wikipedia controversy, analyzed the capacity of web 2.0 to bring about "change", and explored the online video market.

Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source. Nokia clearly aims to challenge Android, the open source mobile operating system of Google. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that it wants to create "the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications".

Buried in Bob Iannucci’s discussion at Supernova 2008 last week was this comment: “Connecting people only through voice communications is limited,” the Nokia chief technical officer said.

To us, that sums up everything Nokia is doing, including today’s announcement. Nokia, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, is purchasing Plazes, the location-based social networking service based in Berlin.

The mobile version of the Firefox browser is now available for download in the form of an early prototype. This download of the browser, code-named "Fennec," is only intended for developers as it is still in the pre-alpha stages. It is also only recommended for Nokia N810 devices. Even so, the browser already shows a lot of promise.

Nokia today announced that it has reached a deal with Microsoft to put Silverlight, Redmond's so-called "Flash killer," on its S60 Symbian OS-powered smartphones, as well as Series 40 devices and its range of Linux-based Internet tablets. ReadWriteWeb network blog last100 has the details.

It's a big week coming up in the Mobile Web world. The annual Mobile World Congress is being held in Barcelona, 11-14 February. The early buzz is around Google's much (and oft) rumored GPhone. According to the Times Online, Google "is expected to produce a prototype mobile handset" at the show. Even if Google itself doesn't unveil a phone, there will be plenty of Android prototypes on display (Google's open source Mobile Operating System).

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

Forget Microsoft, News Corp. or even Apple. Nokia, the world's no.1 mobile handset maker, should buy Yahoo. Or so says Information Week's Stephen Wellman, who puts forward a compelling argument: If Nokia is repositioning itself as a Web services company, to combat falling profit margins on its hardware, then acquiring Yahoo would help to give the company a much needed presence on the desktop (not just mobile), as well as beef up its Web offerings and Internet brand recognition in general.

As part of MTV's coverage of the 2008 presidential elections in the US, the media network assembled a "street team" of 51 amateur journalists -- one in each state and the District of Columbia -- to file blog reports, photos, videos, and audio podcasts about election issues during the course of the campaign season. The videos are being syndicated to MTV's mobile web site, social network, and to the Associate Press Online Video Network. Members of the street team have been outfitted with laptops, video phones, and other popular tools of the citizen journalist via funding from a $700,000 grant from the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge.

paidContent reports that Finnish handset maker, Nokia, is in talks with Facebook to put social networking on the company's mobile phones. The placement of Facebook on handsets could be "as prominent as the YouTube button on the main screen of iPhone," says paidContent. As part of the deal, Nokia could could also purchase a stake in Facebook. Though the talks are at a very early stage, as paidContent says, there are a number of reasons why this makes sense for both companies.