Enough with the white smartphones already! What today is clearly missing are some hot pink mobiles. Delivering the goods, just in time for Valentines Day, are Samsung, who've just given their impressive Galaxy S II handset a new salmon-like shade.

Carphone Warehouse are putting the phone up for sale, with deals starting at £25 and going up to £31 on Orange, Vodafone and O2.

Like the regular black and white variations of the Samsung Galaxy S II, the phone packs a 1.3GHz dual-core processor, 8MP camera with 1080p recording and a luscious 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, all wrapped up in a super-slim 8.49mm case.

For an in depth look at the phone, check out our full review.

Check out the pink deals by clicking here.

With the snow falling up and down the country, so too has a spate of snow-coloured white smartphones. The latest to get the white-washed look is the HTC Sensation XE.

Heading out into the wild on February 20th, Clove have the white HTC Sensation XE listed up at £408.

Originally released in September last year, the new white Sensation XE matches the first version of the phone spec for spec. You're still getting a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and luscious 4.3-inch qHD screen.

Running Android 2.3.4 (with HTC's nifty Sense UI laid over the top), there's also an 8MP camera on the rear, capable of shooting 1080p video, and a VGA front facing one for video calling. You'll also find either an 8GB or 16GB microSD card popped on the box depending on how much you pay, perfect for filling it up with tunes on the Beats Audio device.

Name: Samsung Galaxy Note

Type: Android Smartphone

Specifications: Click here for full specs

Price: £499.91 from Amazon, SIM-free

The Samsung Galaxy Note, AKA the Samsung Galaxy Personality Crisis. Is it a smartphone? Is it a tablet? Is it some altogether new-fangled tech beast? And is it any good? All these questions and more answered in our full review!

Design

Samsung's Galaxy Note is gigantic. If you thought the HTC Sensation XL was big, or even Samsung's own Galaxy S II, you've got another thing coming. The Note is Texas big. Brian Blessed big. With a 5.3 inch screen, it sits somewhere between a smartphone and tablet, while never really feeling quite like one or the other. It'll fit in your hand relatively comfortably, and will cover half your face when making a call.

Big doesn't mean heavy though. Like the Galaxy S II before it, it's very light for its size, weighing just 178g. Despite being so large, it will fit in a generous trouser pocket, though it'll fit more comfortably in a jacket pocket or bag.

The trade off here of course is that whopping screen. While an iPhone may sit snugly in a shirt pocket, it offers nothing close to the visual bang that the Note does. Thanks to 5.3 inches of WXGA (1280 x 800) Super AMOLED Plus goodness at 285ppi, there's little to match the Note's screen in terms of clarity, brightness and vibrancy. A 1.4GHz Exynos SoC (system on chip) processor is onboard, and is basically a slightly souped up version of the processor found in the Galaxy S II. As a result, the phone swipes through screens without any difficulties, and showed very signs of lag.

Measuring just 146.85 x 82.95 x 9.65mm, the handset adopts a fairly minimalist approach to design. A single hardware button sits on the bottom of the Note's front, with a power switch on its right edge, a volume rocker on its left, a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top edge and a recess to tuck away the Note's true USP, the S-Pen stylus, along the bottom edge. More on the S-Pen later, but for now take comfort in the fact that, thanks to a large 2,500mAh battery, you'll get easily a day's worth of use per charge, even with the screen running at its brightest.

The S-Pen stylus

Touchscreen phones were meant to kill off the stylus, right? The late Apple boss Steve Jobs' personal bug bear has even been dropped by long-time supporters Microsoft with Windows Phone 7, but Samsung still see a place for the stylus, resurrected here with the Note as the S-Pen.

Despite a major part of the marketing of the Note (the combo of a large screen and pen-like device is supposed to kill off the need for paper and pencil) the S-Pen proves little more than a gimmick. Though it's comfortable to hold and slips tidily away into a recess on the underside of the phone, it's practically pointless.

You've got note taking apps pre-installed and ones for jotting down doodles, but this is nothing new in and of itself. The note taking app could have had some decent application were its handwriting recognition up to scratch, but in reality it's prone to mistakes and slower to use than simply tapping out a message on a keyboard. The S-Pen may well have 100 levels of sensitivity, but it still sometimes didn't register input, and the software tended to lag slightly behind our preferred scribbling speed.

Sure, it's nice to be able to sign documents properly from your phone, and annotate the odd image or website, but it's a mostly needless addition.

Calling and Messaging

It may be gigantic, but the Note is still a phone at the end of the day. You'll look like a plonker holding it up to your ear, but it's not as ridiculous as using, say, a Galaxy Tab as a phone. Your best bet is to pair it with a Bluetooth headset, though that's not a necessity, providing you've got reasonable mates who wont twist your arm too much for the size of your phone.

The dialler is pretty much standard Android fare, but has a few Samsung stylings of its own. Along the top of the app are tabs for the keypad, call logs, contacts, favourites and groups. You can manually attach Twitter and Facebook info to contacts too, though it is not handled quite a slickly as HTC's Sense manages to.

If you can brave putting the Note to your ear, call quality proves excellent, with no interference and clear noise reduction. Signal strength remained consistently high too. As you'd imagine, the phone is a perfect fit for video calling apps, using the Note's 2MP front-facing camera.

For email, you get the standard Android Gmail client with is always excellent, and Samsung's own Mail app which can also pull in all manner of  POP3/IMAP and Exchange accounts you may use. It also makes full use of the large screen, offering a split, two-pane view of your messages when put in landscape orientation.

The standard Gignerbread keyboard is here for email and SMS messaging, but with the screen the size it is, you'll only comfortably be able to tap out messages with two hands. Of course, you could use the S-Pen, but as we stated above, that's just as clumsy.

Interface and apps

Just missing out on Ice Cream Sandwich, the Note is running Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) out of the box, with Samsung's light TouchWiz re-skinning over the top. Again, if you've used a Galaxy S II, you'll feel right at home, with "Hubs" collecting apps for social sites like Twitter or Facebook, gaming portals and apps in the Gaming hub, book buying and reading apps in the Reader hub and music and media playback in the Music hub.

As with all Android phones you get ample ability to customise the experience, and Samsung offer a strong array of live widgets (many of which can be resized) for displaying information at a glance across the seven homescreens. Pinching the screen gives an exploded view of all seven homescreens at once, letting you jump quickly from one to another. It's a little fiddly, but apps can be arranged into folders too.

Drag down from the top of the screen and you'll be presented with the Android notifications bar, housing all your email, app, or social network updates. Samsung place a quick settings toolbar in here too, which is handy for quickly accessing GPS, Wi-Fi and profile options.

All the usual Google apps are onboard, including Maps, Talk, Latitude and Places, and you get access to the Android Market app store for grabbing new software. Voice control comes courtesy of a premium version of Vlingo; it's not quite as fully featured as Apple's Siri, but you can quickly train it to navigate media and jump to contacts with the power of your voice alone.

Samsung's Internet browser is the star of the pre-installed app line up though, and again that's mostly thanks to the quality of the screen in the first place. It's so big as to make full screen browsing not far off the experience you'd have with a tablet device, with eminently readable, crisp text and vibrant images. This being an Android device, you have none of the Flash woes that hamstring Apple's devices when it comes to browsing.

The extra screen real estate allows for a few useful additions to the browser UI, such as dedicated page forward and back buttons, as well as dedicated button for jumping between open tabs. There's even static page name info above the address bar. Though text reflow could at times be a little erratic when pinching and zooming on pages, it's still the closest we've come to a desktop browsing experience from a pocketable device.

Media playback and Gaming

The Galaxy Note really comes into its own when it comes to media playback. With a screen this big, and this gorgeous, it'll be a godsend come lengthy car trips or when you're stuck for something to watch in bed. Grab something like the Netflix movie and TV streaming app and you may find yourself glued to the Note all day long. There's even a setting that pushes the brightness levels of the screen even further for viewing in direct sunlight, though be prepared to take a noticeable knock to your battery level as a result.

Samsung have done a good job of providing solid file-format support with their video player, with the device expertly handling everything we threw at it, including MP4, M4V, Xvid, DivX, AVI and 3GP file types. Throw in DLNA support and you're sharing video to and from the Note to all manner of devices, making it an expert media experience. Samsung's video playing app even allows for some basic editing work to be done, which is handy if you're looking to upload to YouTube directly from the device.

Though competent enough, the music player is basically stock Android with a slight re-skinning. You can muck about with EQ settings, and get album cover artwork, but for a deeper music organisational experience you may want to download a third party app.

Gaming on the Note is also really strong. With a powerful processor and impressive screen, you're approaching iPad levels of playability. This was best illustrated with a quick game of the Grand Theft Auto III Android edition, where there wasn't a hint of stutter and the the virtual control pad didn't impede the view of the action in any significant way.

Still Camera and Video

The Note uses an identical 8MP rear camera as that found in the Galaxy S II. That's no bad thing, as that smartphone was capable of some superb shots. Thanks to the dual-core processor, you can boot the phone up from off and be in the camera app shooting snaps within little more than 5 seconds, which is great when you've got to capture a fleeting moment.

Images are crisp and detailed, with accurate auto-focus and colour reproduction. You also get a decent array of manual controls such as ISO settings, as well as Panorama modes and plenty of scene selection settings to scroll through to add a smidgen of Instagram-like cool to your shots.

Despite its strong image capturing chops, the Note is hardly the ideal snapper though. As it's so large, it's actually quite cumbersome to hold when taking a picture. With no dedicated shutter button, you'll be tapping away at the screen to take shots, which means you have to hold the over-sized device in some quite awkward positions. The size of the screen also makes it far too easy to accidentally brush it while taking a photo, leading to unintentional shifts in focus.

Video shooting still impresses though, with Full HD recording at 1080p/30fps possible. The results are sharp, and the image stabilisation does a good job of keeping moving images from being too jumpy. It suffers a little from noise in dark scenes though, and sometimes takes a little longer than we'd have liked to find a sensible point of focus using AF.

Verdict:

Samsung's Galaxy Note has all the trappings of a great phone. Its re-skinned version of Android gingerbread is understated and makes useful changes. Its screen is gorgeous to look at and a joy to use. Its processor allows for demanding multitasking and its camera offers both detailed still photography and clear HD video capture. However, its main selling point (its large screen) is also its downfall, as it's just impractical as an everyday device. It's just too cumbersome to replace a smaller, more versatile smartphone. Also, the Note's S-Pen is a massive disappointment, a gimmick that doesn't really add any useful functionality to an already-responsive UI and touchscreen combo. While it's a superb multimedia device, its going to take a person with very unique needs for it to be their ideal smartphone.

If LG are looking to take on Samsung's Galaxy Note in the giant phone stakes, they're sure going about it in an unusual way. The Korean arm of LG have just revealed a teaser for an LG Optimus Vu phone.

So what's so strange? Well apart from the giant 5-inch screen, how about the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio? Said to be running Android 2.3, Lord only knows how many apps will be compatible with its unconventional screen size, or will be stretched and skewed out of all recognition.

However, LG state that the size is more comfortable in the hand than regular widescreen handsets, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt...for now.

Elsewhere, the Vu is said to sport a 1.5GHz Qualcomm APQ8060 SoC, 1GB RAM, 8GB ROM, NFC and an eight megapixel camera.

Quite the oddity, we'll have more news on the Vu as it trickles in.

HTC's much-rumoured Ville Android smartphone has had its cover blown, with a detailed look at its specification sheet heading online ahead of its grand unveiling at Mobile World Congress 2012.

Chinese blog ePrice have been made privvy to the details with a zippy 1.5GHz dual-core processor headlining the tech on board.

1GB RAM also looks set to feature, alongside a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, 8MP camera with full HD recording, 3MP front-facing camera and the now-standard Beats Audio on the HTC handset.

Android's latest version, Ice Cream Sandwich is onboard, with HTC's latest Sense re-skinning (4.0) also loaded on here.

In terms of physical size, it's fairly slim too at around am 8mm thickness, and shares a similar look to the Desire S.

We'll hopefully be able to give full confirmation on the specs later this month, when the MWC show kicks off.

Just in time to meet the UK's snowfall, Nokia have just announced that their Lumia 800 handset will be hitting Blighty's shores in a new white shade.

"The story of the Nokia Lumia is one of reduction and purity," says Nokia's colour and material designer Tiina Aarrasshe.

"White is the ultimate colour of reduction. It's also perfect for emphasising the black polished screen. If you stand a white Lumia 800 on a table the body almost disappears, and the black screen seems to lift up and float."

Apart from the fresh lick of paint, it's business as usual for the Lumia 800. The Windows Phone 7 device still sports a 3.7-inch, WVGA 800x480 AMOLED display, an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics, all powered by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon processor. 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage (plus 25GB of SkyDrive storage) round off the specs.

To mark the arrival of the new smartphone shade, Nokia are also launching a new "White selection" on their Mix Radio music service, with tracks from the likes of the White Stripes and Barry White up for grabs.

Shipping in March, you can pre-order a white Nokia Lumia 800 from Phone 4U now, with contracts starting at £20.50 a month.

Microsoft have lifted the lid on Windows Phone 8, the next major upgrade for their smartphone operating system.

Revealed to PocketNow via an internal Microsoft products video, Windows Phone 8 will be the official name of the update initially codenamed Apollo, which should follow the Tango update before the end of the year.

The OS will allow apps to work not only on your phone, but also with corresponding applications on the desktop version of Windows 8, also expected to land later this year.

Windows Phone 8 will also add NFC capabilities to handsets running Microsoft's OS, letting data be shared between two handsets just by touching them together, or for payments to be made at NFC checkout points.

The update will also introduce the DataSmart live tile, which helps a user manage how much mobile data they're using in order to keep their phone bills down. The app will also intelligently aim to connect to a Wi-Fi connection over a mobile data connection each time.

Looking a reasonably well-rounded update, we'll have more on Windows Phone 8 as it edges closer to launching.

Here's an Android smartphone with a difference; Middlesex University student Kieron-Scott Woodhouse has put together a bamboo blower!

The 23 year-old Brit, working alongside ADzero, has been working on the project after a number of his previous concept designs were picked up on gadget blogs around the globe.

He's now working with the company to make the Bamboo ADzero a reality; an Android phone half the weight of an iPhone, with a unibody design crafted entirely from a single piece of four year-old bamboo.

"The whole experience so far has been incredible and completely unexpected," said Woodhouse.

"Completing my final year and working has been challenging, but my course and the project complement each other well and it's a great start of my career. I can't wait to see my mobile phone in shops this year."

Though initially only set for release in China, the buzz generated by the handset's design means it will now get a limited release through boutique shops in the UK too. We'll keep you posted on the details of the release, but for now marvel at the design in the video above.

Could this be the turning point for BlackBerry makers RIM? We hope so, as an apparent leaked shot of their first BlackBerry 10-packing superphone, dubbed the "London" leaks online.

Looking like a cross between a BlackBerry PlayBook and an iPhone, it's claimed to be RIM's newest flagship device, set to hit stores before the end of the year.

Revealed in what appears to be an internal corporate slide, the London has plenty of buzzwords bandied around it, calling it the "Ultimate Communication Device" and featuring a "Rich specification - hardware & software". Spotters CrackBerry are also claiming the device will have a 1.5GHz dual core processor either from Qualcomm or Texas Instruments, a .5GHz jump over the PlayBook tablet.

Hard to really judge the legitimacy of the image; we know RIM are hedging their bets to deliver something revolutionary by their standards this year, while the lingo used does seem full of enough chaff to be genuine executive-speak. The handset itself though looks far more like a render than a genuine photo of a device.

We'll bring you any updates on RIM's smartphone plans as we get them.

Via: CrackBerry

Those looking forward to the debut of the Samsung Galaxy S III look away now; you're going to have to wait a little longer to see Samsung's next superphone be revealed.

The Korean tech giants have just released a statement confirming that the Android handset will not be unveiled at the world's largest mobile technology show, but will instead launch at its own dedicated event.

"The successor to the Galaxy S II smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted event in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the product," reads the statement from Samsung.

That's not to say Sasmung wont have plenty of other goodies on display at the show: "Samsung is looking forward to introducing and demonstrating exciting new mobile products at Mobile World Congress 2012," and is "committed to providing the best possible mobile experiences for customers around the world".

Samsung have just officially revealed that the Galaxy S Advance handset is on its way.

Android-loving smartphone fans will be able to enjoy a mid-spec handset, with a 4-inch Super AMOLED display (480x800), and dual-core 1GHz processor with 768MB of RAM.

Isn't it funny how little less than a a year after the first wave of dual-core handsets are launched, a smartphone sporting similar specs in early 2012 is already relegated to the mid-range tier?

Anyway, we digress! Elsewhere on the S Advance you'll find a 5MP camera, a 1.3MP front facing snapper and HSPA 14.4Mbps connectivity.

Android version 2.3 is loaded on here, with Samsung's TouchWiz UI re-skinning pasted on top, offering their Hubs system, ChatON and Find My Mobile for forgetful types.

"The Galaxy S Advance adds to the successful track record of the Galaxy smartphone range with a phone that combines power and style with all the versatility of Samsung's Hub services," said Samsung's JK Shin.

Hitting Russia first from February, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance is set to hit Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America and China, Europe, Africa and the Middle East soon after.

Motorola have announced that they too (alongside Nintendo and Nokia in the consumer tech world) have seen a loss in profits during Q4 of the 2011 fiscal year.

The firm announced they'd experienced an $80 million (£51 million) loss over the quarter, citing poor sales of their mobile devices as the primary cause.

Motorola only managed to sell 10.5 million mobile devices across the 3-month period, 5.3 million of which where smartphones. Their much-hyped Xoom tablet line performed poorly too, selling roughly 200,000 units across the quarter for a total of just 1 million for the entire year.

As a result, Motorola have posted yearly losses of $249 million (£158 million), up considerably from last year's figure of $86 million (£54 million).

Motorola, whose buyout from search giant's Google is expected to be finalised early this year, are now expected to take a similar course of action as HTC over the coming 12 months, focussing on a few core products that excel rather than the wide range currently offered.

Via: Tech Radar / So Mobile

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It's coming, and it might be with us sooner than some had thought; the Galaxy S III Android smartphone has seemingly popped up in a listing on an official Samsung website, fuelling speculation that the handset's launch is just over the horizon.

Appearing on the Samsung UAE Global Download Center page (which hosts device manuals, software and drivers for Samsung products), the listing refers to a device with the model number GT-I9300.

If you take a look at the model number trend for the rest of Samsung's Galaxy range, it appears to be a reference to the Galaxy S III.

With the original Galaxy S listed as the GT-I90xx and, Galaxy S II using GT-I91xx and the Galaxy Nexus given GT-I9250, it makes sense for the S III to jump to GT-I9300.

Despite this seemingly official notification, Samsung are still yet to confirm a launch date for the Galaxy S III. However, this latest snippet of information seems to suggest the handset is indeed on course for a MWC 2012 unveiling.

Via: PocketNow

HTC's next update to their Sense Android UI re-skinning looks to be a significant one according to a new report from PocketNow.

They've got their hands on a "non-final build" of Sense 4.0, which they state now offers 50GB of Dropbox storage space via a virtual drive, with the cloud storage service deeply integrated into other apps on the handsets, such as the email client.

It will be a major boost for HTC fans, following the Taiwanese firm's partnership with Dropbox back in October last year. It was first thought that HTC would offer just 5GB of Dropbox storage with each new phone.

Other improvements to the Android re-skinning according to PocketNow include graphical streamlining for "reduced visual clutter", a new task switcher, universal Beats support, a more informative lock-screen and a major overhaul of the native email client, which the blog describes as the "best-looking and most functional email client available for Android".

Very exciting stuff, and very much in line of HTC new "quality over quantity" mantra for 2012. We'll bring you more on Sense 4.0 come MWC 2012, where the new OS skin alongside HTC's new handset range is expected to be revealed.

Via: Pocket Now

As if the constantly-looming threat of death by execution and imprisonment in hard labour camps wasn't enough, North Koreans have a new strictly punishable rule that must be adhered to. Those caught using a mobile phone will now be branded a war criminal by the dictatorial state which, we'd imagine, is an offence punishable with imprisonment in a hard labour camp and/or execution too.

That's because the totalitarian government believe that all citizen's excess energies, when not working to the bone for little or no reward, should be spent mourning the late "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il II. The no-mobiles rule is part of the 100-day state-imposed "mourning period" for the bespectacled one with a love of looking at things.

In a somewhat cruel irony, it's unlikely that the new law will affect all that many North Koreans. As The Next Web point out, less than 5% of the poverty-stricken population own a mobile phone anyway.

Via: The Telegraph

RIM's BlackBerry Bold 9790 handset is now on sale through Vodafone.

The QWERTY keyboard-packing handset is available free on £31, 24 month price plans, which offer 600 mins, unlimited texts and 500MB of mobile data.

Running off a 1GHz processor, the 110 x 60 x 11.4mm phone feature's RIM's BlackBerry 7 OS, the company's most recent operating system update, as well as a 2.45 inch touchscreen and 8GB of internal storage space, expandable up to 32GB with microSD cards.

New and upgrading customers will also benefit from 3 months worth of free data through Vodafone's Data Test Drive service, letting them explore just how much data they consume on the handset in a month before committing to a monthly data plan.

For more info, visit Vodafone's website here.

HTC released no less than 19 Android phones in 2011, five of which landed in the final quarter of the year alone. But that rate of output is likely to slow in 2012, as HTC have announced they are to focus on a smaller range of high-quality smartphones in the coming year to reclaim their crown as Android kings.

"We had a fantastic year [in 2011], with 65 per cent growth year on year in the UK," HTC's UK boss Phil Roberson told Mobile Today.

"But in Q4 we delivered a lot more products than in the past. Now we want to create more of a 'Hero' approach. We make great phones, but it is hard to do that when the portfolio is spread too much.We have to get back to focusing on what made us great - amazing hardware and a great customer experience.

"So 2012 is about giving our customers something special. We need to make sure we do not go so far down the line that we segment our products by launching lots of different SKUs."

Though HTC may have been championed by the Android community with the launch of the HTC Hero in 2009 or the Desire HD in 2010, they saturated the market with their products, leaving the door wide-open for Samsung to breeze in with the Galaxy S II and steal hearts and minds.

Samsung themselves release more handsets than you can shake a squat green robot at, but there is always a clearly defined top-tier handset on show, something HTC have failed to deliver over the past year. If Roberson's claims prove true, it could be a great year to get back on the HTC bandwagon.

Fancy a bit of Xbox Live gaming on your Android or Apple iOS device? That's the possiblity being speculated upon today after a loose-lipped Microsoft executive teased the expansion of the platform.

Speaking to Forbes, an Xbox spokesperson stated that:

"While the Xbox Live experiences and games always work best on the Windows platform, we understand that some Xbox fans may be using other types of devices. To satisfy that need, we are working to extend a few of our Xbox experiences and titles to other platforms."

When it comes to mobile, only devices packing Microsoft's own Windows Phone OS have access to playable Xbox Live games. While the iOS App Store offers the Xbox Live status, stats and message tracking app My Xbox Live, as well as the standalone Kinectimals app, it doesn't yet offer gaming that's integrated into the same experience you'd find on Microsoft's home console. The same goes for Android devices.

While expansion to other platforms would be great news for consumers, Microsoft will have to weigh any eventual decision up very carefully. On the one hand, moving onto iOS and Android would greatly expand the Redmond company's mobile gaming dominance. But on the other, it will detract from the Xbox Live integration that is a key differentiator on their struggling Windows Phone 7 platform.

Despite the promising launch of Nokia's first set of Windows Phone 7 devices with their Lumia range, it's still tough times for the Finnish company. Revealing that their smartphone fightback is far from over, they've announced an operating loss of a massive €954 million, (roughly £800 million) for the last three months of 2011.

Net sales too dropped 21% compared to the previous year, down from €12.65 billion to a little above €10 billion.

The figures come in stark contrast to last year's €884 million profit. But the company continues to sell handsets in staggering figures. Let's not for forget that just yesterday the mobile giant's announced the sale of their 1.5 billionth Symbian Series 40 device.

93.9 million feature phones were sold alongside the 19.6 million shifted by their struggling smartphone division for a grand total of 113.5 million devices. This, however, was still a significant drop from 123.7 million units in the same period of 2010.

Even the average handset unit price has dropped, going from €69 down to €53, further cutting into Nokia's fortunes.

"In the war of ecosystems, clearly there are some strong contenders already on the field," said CEO Stephen Elop.

"And with Lumia, we have demonstrated that we belong on the field. Our specific intent has been to establish a beachhead in this war of ecosystems, and country by country that is what we are now accomplishing.

"And, while we progressed in the right direction in 2011, we still have a tremendous amount to accomplish in 2012, and thus, it is my assessment that we are in the heart of our transition.

"In summary, with a strong balance sheet, our performance in mobile phones and the new excitement around Lumia, we are confident that we are on the right track to build long-term value."

Elop may be confident, but it's still very much an uphill battle he and his company faces. With share prices dropping and job cuts hitting every level of the company, the Lumia range has to pick up years' worth of slack, something it may struggle to do.

HP have set a September launch date for the open source version of their failed OS, webOS.

Open webOS was announced back in September, after a few precarious months that saw the future of the OS put in doubt when the TouchPad tablet from HP, using the OS, bombed. By issuing an open source version, HP are hoping it will live on as an alternative to Android and Windows Phone 7 for handset manufacturers.

"HP is bringing the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community," said Bill Veghte, executive vice president and chief strategy officer of HP.

"This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform's development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of web applications."

A new generation of Enyo framework (the Javascript WebKit app that allows cross-platform distribution of apps) will land first, followed quickly by Enyo 2.0 and 2.1 in April. Apps built using these standards will allow them to run not only on mobile devices, but desktop browsers too.

While it's great to see the once-promising OS live to fight another day, we can't help but feel HP's handling of the software may have turned people off of it for good. It'll be interesting to see just how many developers get onboard and start tinkering with the platform once again.

Via: Developer.Palm.com