Symbian

Smartphones 1, Hackers 0

There were several $10,000 prizes at stake -- as well as some free mobile phones -- but at the end of the three-day Pwn2Own smartphone hacking contest at the big CamSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, which closed on Friday, none of the devices had been cracked.

The contest, sponsored by 3Com's (COMS) TippingPoint computer security division, pitted some of the world's sharpest hackers and computer security experts against five smartphones: MORE

White hat hackers target the iPhone

How secure is your smartphone? We may find out next month.

Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry and phones running on Google's (GOOG) Android, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Nokia's (NOK) Symbian operating systems.

The contest, sponsored by 3Com's (COMS) TippingPoint computer security division, MORE

A taxonomy of iPhone competitors

Who can keep track of all the touchscreen smartphones -- and their attendant app stores -- that emerged from Mobile World Congress this week to compete with Apple's (AAPL) iPhone?

RBC Capital's Mike Abramsky can. Attached to a report to clients released Friday is a handy chart of "emerging competitors" that covers most of the latest mobile operating systems: Palm's (PALM) webOS, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile 6.5, Google's (GOOG) Android, Nokia's MORE

Now everybody has an App Store

It's Mobile World Congress week in Barcelona, where the city's famous pickpockets have dozens of new gadgets to choose from, and the shadow of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone once again looms large.

Last year, rival cellphone manufacturers used the event to announce their own touchscreen smartphones.

This year, what's getting the love is the iTunes App Store, with its 20,000-plus applications and half a billion downloads.

Among the announcements making headlines this week:

Nokia's MORE

iPhone market share grew 327.5%

We've known since October, when Apple released its latest earnings report, that the iPhone had a bang-out summer - shipping nearly 7 million units in the quarter, up from just over 1.1 million the year before.

But it wasn't until Thursday, when Gartner Research issued its smartphone sales report for the third quarter of 2008, that we learned just how well the iPhone did vis-a-vis its competitors.

Apple's (AAPL) share of the MORE

iPhone grabs 30% of U.S. smartphone market

Apple's iPhone is the star in a series of charts published Tuesday by Needham & Co. analyst Charles Wolf.

The first is a quarter-by-quarter snapshot of the worldwide smartphone market that shows a sharp uptick in Apple's (AAPL) share set against the downward drift of its major competitors -- Nokia's (NOK) Symbian, RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile.

The second chart shows the same data without Symbian -- which lets MORE

iPhone passes RIM, gains on Nokia

A snapshot of the global smartphone market issued Thursday by Canalys shows just how big a dent Apple's iPhone made in the cellphone universe last quarter.

With a surge of nearly 6.9 million shipments in calendar Q3, the iPhone leapfrogged past RIM (RIMM) and Motorola (MOT) to grab 17.3% of the smartphone market.

That put Apple (AAPL) in second place after Nokia, and helped cut the market-leader's share from 51.4% to 38.9%.

It MORE

iPhone's Q3 sales second only to Blackberry in U.S.

Here are two pictures worth a couple thousand words. They're from a study commissioned by Symbian (jointly owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung), but published so quietly that we might never had heard about it if Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted had not dug it out.

What the study shows, among other things, is that, in its first full quarter of sales, Apple's (AAPL) iPhone outsold MORE