The Middle East is perhaps not what many people think of as one of the hottest telecom market in the world but new numbers by Informa Telecoms & Media may change your mind.

In total, the Middle East will see over 250 million mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2012. Iran, by far the biggest market in the Middle East for mobile phone subscriptions, will account for around 90 million by end of 2011, predicted to grow to 122 million by end of 2016.

In terms of smartphones, the UAE is predicted to have over 70% smartphone penetration by 2016, up from 47% today. Compare this with the United States, with a smartphone penetration of 40% as of September 2011.

Let’s have a look at some of the other numbers to see what else is interesting.

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There’s no denying that tablets are increasingly used as web browsing devices. We reported a while ago that Apple’s iPad in itself accounted for 1.2% of worldwide web usage. Out of all tablets, iPad accounted for 88% of worldwide tablet web traffic and Android grabbed almost 11%.

And according to several research reports, web ad campaigns get better CTR (Click Through Rates) and lower CPC (Cost Per Click) on tablets than both smartphones and regular desktop computers.

But why better CTR and CPC? It could be because tablets are most often used in environments where the user should feel relaxed, like in their home and in the evening, thereby making them more likely to tap on ads.

We wonder however if there’s not something more sneaky at play here? Could the higher CTR be explained, at least in part, by users mistakenly tapping on web ads on a tablet, something known as the fat-finger problem?

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Internet is a powerful tool for disseminating information, communication, entertainment, education and much more. One thing the Internet has not conquered, at least not yet, is smell.

If you’re currently struggling with HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and whatever else web-tech thing you’re working on, get ready to add some kind of code for smell as well.

Olly is a creation of the research team Foundry at Mint Digital. It’s apparently three months in the making and the team calls it “the web connected smelly robot!”

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Today is Thanksgiving and although it’s primarily a North American tradition its impact reaches across the globe. The stuffed turkey dinner, Black Friday sales and other traditions associated with Thanksgiving are starting to make an appearance in many other parts of the world.

We wanted to do something a bit different for a Thanksgiving post so we thought, who would a geek want to have over for Thanksgiving dinner?

Of course we would all want different people to join us for different reasons. And yes, we tried to stick to real people.

Who would you invite? Here is our selection.

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Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.

Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.

One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.

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Over the past year, web pages have on average become 25% bigger. We’re not talking about dimensions here, but download size. Based on the top 1,000 websites on the Internet, the average page size has gone from 626 kB to 784 kB.

A 25% size increase in just one year is rather drastic. With that kind of growth, the average web page will be 980 kB in just a year (amost 1 MB!). In five years, a page will be almost 2.4 MB. And that’s just an average, many pages will be significantly larger.

What is behind this exploding growth? Let’s find out.

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We’re excited for our U.S. readers that Google has introduced its online music service – finally. For the rest of us, we have to wait and see when we’ll be lucky enough to see Google Music’s presence where we live.

Google Music went live almost nine years after Apple opened the doors to its iTunes Store. To see what Google is up against, we have collected a plethora of numbers about iTunes from all over the Web.

As you will see, Google is facing some long odds. We hope for Google’s sake this isn’t a case of too little, too late, considering what a behemoth they are competing with.

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We’re all fans of cool screensavers here at Pingdom so we wanted to pick a few of our favorites and share them with you. A great screensaver is a good way to personalize your computer and to make a statement.

Digging deep through screensaver history we found these 10 that we find especially impressive.

Many of the screensavers below work with both Mac and Windows (and at least one with Linux too) but you should probably check the system requirements before downloading a particular screensaver. All the screensavers are free.

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There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.

However, despite all these Android tablets, according to comScore in October 2011, 95.5% of all tablet web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPad.

That is a stunning number. So, is anyone really buying all these shipping Android tablets, and what do people do with them after they buy them? Because they don’t seem to be surfing the Web.

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Mobile Internet adoption and speeds are increasing across the world. Sweden is one example of a country where Internet connections – mobile as well as fixed – are plentiful and fast.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) is in charge of monitoring the electronic communications and postal sectors in the country. In the latest report from PTS on telephony and the Internet, which covers the development through the the first half of 2011, we found some nuggets of information in terms of mobile data subscribers and traffic we felt worthy of a comparison to what’s happening globally.

These numbers should also be a good indication of how rapidly mobile Internet use is ramping up in other, similar countries (for example the rest of Scandinavia).

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