LG

The iPhone is No. 4

With 90%-plus growth, Apple vaults past RIM and is gaining rapidly on Nokia and LG

The iPhone has been one of the world's top selling smartphones almost since it hit the market three years ago. But in the larger, 1.2-billion-units-per-year mobile phone market, it never cracked the top five.

Until now.

In IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker survey, issued late Thursday, Apple (AAPL) overtook Research in Motion (RIMM) to become the MORE

Who is suing whom

It's getting hard to tell the litigants without an infographic. Here's the best one we've seen.

Note that the companies whose revenue is decreasing, such as Nokia (NOK) and Kodak (EK), tend to launch more lawsuits than those that are growing, such as Apple (AAPL) and LG.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Microsoft Windows Phone 7: Simply (Not That) Different

If this reboot of the Microsoft phone platform underwhelms, CEO Steve Ballmer might have to open the purse strings and make an acquisition. (Hello, BlackBerry!)

One thing the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 has going for it is that no one's expecting much. The company's last mobile operating system was clunky, antiquated, and subsequently retired. The Kin One and Two, those smartphone-like pair of devices that Microsoft launched for youngsters earlier MORE

Mobile phones: Who's up, who's down and who's moving sideways

Three years of pitched battle for share and profit reduced to a set of vectors

Asymco's Horace Dediu is a master of the art of turning bland data into eye-opening visualizations.

His latest, posted Tuesday afternoon, starts with two sets of data in two points of time -- market share and share of profit in 2007 and 2010 -- for eight vendors in the mobile phone space, from Apple (AAPL), the smallest MORE

How Apple is sucking the profit out of the mobile phone business

The iPhone's growing share of the spoils could spell bad news for Google's partners

On Tuesday we posted a pair of pie charts that showed Apple (AAPL) selling 3% of the world's mobile phones in the first half of 2010 and taking 39% of the industry's profits. (See Apple's outrageous share of the mobile industry's profits.)

Asymco's Horace Dediu, however, did us one better. He published the graph above charting MORE

iPhone tops J.D. Power's customer satisfaction survey for 4th year in a row

Here's one we're sure to hear about at the next Apple (AAPL) press event.

For the fourth time in a row, the iPhone has come in first in J.D. Power and Associates' semi-annual smartphone customer satisfaction survey with a score of 800 out of 1,000 -- well ahead of its competitors.

If it weren't for the iPhone's battery life -- much improved on the iPhone 4 but still all-too-brief on older models MORE

Android report card: Which manufacturers are out in front?

I'm rating manufacturers on how well they provide a ' quality Android experience' to U.S. customers.

When buying an Android device, you want to know if your phone is going to be updated promptly to the latest operating system.

You want to make sure that carriers aren't going to add any applications or processes that impede the Android experience. Manufacturers' Android overlays must be kept in check if you don't want MORE

Pie chart: Apple's outrageous share of the mobile industry's profits

Cupertino is raking in the cash as its competitors struggle to post any profit at all

Canaccord Genuity initiated coverage of Apple (AAPL) Tuesday with a "buy" rating and a price target of $356 per share.

In the long, laudatory accompanying note by T. Michael Walkley, their new Apple specialist, the two paragraphs that jumped out at us were the ones that talked about the company's ability not just to innovate, but MORE

Today in Tech: News around the Web

A round-up of the companies, deals, and trends that made headlines.

Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We've assembled the morning's most newsworthy bits below.

Former HP (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd made his first public comments as Oracle (ORCL) co-president to discuss the company's huge growth opportunities. Oracle's first-quarter revenue rose MORE

Is the iPad driving down chip prices?

Samsung warns of a memory glut from weakening PC sales as consumers turn to tablets

File this under unintended consequences.

On Tuesday, according to Reuters, the world's largest manufacturer of memory chips warned that DRAM prices may fall in the next two quarters due to weakening demand for notebook and desktop computers.

"If the PC market continues to slow, we may see a kind of oversupply in Q4 or Q1," Kwon Oh-hyun, head MORE