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Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE jumped ahead of Apple worldwide last year, according to IDG. ZTE doubled its shipped products in the fourth quarter of 2011 over the third and increased year-over-year by almost 60%. They now own just under 5% of global market share.

Now, ZTE has announced an anticipating doubling of its sales over the next year, with the United States becoming its primary market by 2015, according to Bloomberg.

First, the U.S. Army's Captain Jonathan Springer developed the iPhone app, Tactical Nav, for battlefield mapping and artillery sighting. Now, Ft. Bragg has developed an integrated system for many of the same things based on the Android operating system. According to the Army's Web page on the project, the security of the system is paramount.

"The device, known as a Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, is the first developed under an Army effort to devise an Android-based smartphone framework and suite of applications for tactical operations. The government-owned framework, known as Mobile /Handheld Computing Environment, or CE, ensures that regardless of who develops them, applications will be secure and interoperable with existing mission command systems so information flows seamlessly across all echelons of the force."

The data that extends to a smartphone points to the need for more focused ways to protect networks from security breaches.

At IBM Pulse this past week, IBM Threat Intelligence Manager Tom Cross said the need for enterprise management is a hot topic for IT managers. Citing IBM's own research, Cross said IBM surveys show that 90% of IT managers are investing to secure end points in the enterprise.

The long-rumored Playstation Phone just made its official debut by way of a high-profile Super Bowl advertisement and updated Facebook page. The phone, known as the Xperia Play, has been expected to appear at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Now, according to Sony Ericsson's Facebook page, the date is set: Feb. 13, 2011 at 18:00 GMT (or 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific).

The announcement should bring news of the phone's price, carrier partnership(s) and launch date.

Bada, Samsung's own mobile operating system, on track to power around 5 million phones by year-end, has just updated its software development kit (SDK) to version 1.2.1. The update reportedly includes an important new feature: in-app advertising capabilities. The feature, which will allow bada developers to monetize their apps, will go live beginning January 1st, 2011. At least, that's the news coming out of Samsung Hub, an unofficial source that typically publishes reliable content and scoops.

Samsung recently announced it expects to sell around 5 million bada-powered handsets by the end of 2010 and that the total number of application downloads in Samsung's app store is expected to surpass 50 million by December. That's an impressive start for a mobile operating system that was only publicly revealed a year ago, where the first bada phone, the Samsung Wave, didn't ship until June, and where the Wave was the only bada phone available until October when additional models were launched.

To put this in perspective, Samsung has been shipping more Wave phones in the past few months since its launch than any other smartphone manufacturer except for Apple with the iPhone. But does that mean developers should now be paying attention to bada?

The smartphone is always taking on new roles - from credit cards to MP3 players and digital cameras to airline boarding passes. Now, your smartphone will begin opening new doors for you, quite literally.

Two Holiday Inn hotels have begun using iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones as room keys, meaning guests don't even need to stop at the front desk on their way in the door.

Engineers at the University of Washington are developing the first mobile technology able to transmit American Sign Language (ASL) over cellular networks. The software called MobileASL currently runs on phones imported from Europe while being tested, but it could be configured to run on any device in the near future.

If you're wondering how the engineers are claiming "first" when video conferencing solutions, most notably Apple's FaceTime and mobile video applications like Fring, already provide face-to-face communications ideal for signing, the difference is in the technology behind mobileASL itself.

It's the earliest of days of smartphone cloud computing. But it 's time has arrived as demonstrated by a group of researcher who have showed how smartphones can be used to create a self-contained cloud computing network.

Using smartphones to create a cloud computing infrastructure is a bit quizzical. Each smart phone has a fraction of the processing power of a remote server. But there are advantages to a mobile device oriented network. Data does not have to travel to remote servers in a data center. Overall, the research demonstrates the advances we should expect as smartphone-based cloud computing networks begin emerging as an alternative to traditional data centers.

According to MIT Technology Review, the researchers developed using "misco, a version of MapReduce that can be handled by a "server farm" comprised of 20-odd Nokia N95 smartphones."

In a report examining quarterly mobile device sales, research firm Gartner found that sales of mobile devices have increased by nearly 14% since the same period in 2009, with smartphone sales accounting for 19% of worldwide devices sales.

According to the report, certain factors such as components shortages restricted smartphone sales, but overall sales increased by 50%, with Android making the biggest gains among smartphone platforms.