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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.
In this show we get some updates on the progress of the Carbon Twitter app for Windows Phone, we discuss Intel coming back to smartphones, and Saleh picks a bone with some iOS fanboys criticizing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. He has a chance to explain himself.
In December, we looked at how the Internet has spread across the world from 1991 to 2010. We presented this in the form of an animation, highlighting each country in different colors depending in what percentages of the population were online.
Now we bring you a follow-up. This time we use data from the World Bank for mobile subscriptions per 100 people and map it out over the years.
As it turns out, there’s quite a difference between the two.
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.
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).
Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.
A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.
But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.
Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Lately the company has had its thunder stolen by Apple’s iPhone and the plethora of Android devices flooding the market, especially in the fast-growing smartphone market.
In other words, Nokia is in a bit of trouble. However, considering how much flack the company has been getting lately in the tech press, we thought it would be nice to look back and give Nokia some credit for what they have accomplished in the past. Because it’s a past filled to the brim with innovation.
We increasingly access the Web from our mobile phones, especially now that the rise of smartphones is making it easier than ever to get a decent web experience on the small screen.
However, the highest share of mobile web usage isn’t in the most developed nations, but rather in the developing nations of the world.
These days it seems like Android is on the lips of every tech geek out there, and it is arguably one of the most successful Linux-based products ever. But Android is not the only Linux-based mobile OS in town. Far from it.
In fact, Linux is such a common base for mobile operating systems that you may very well have used feature phones or smartphones running Linux without ever realizing it.
Here we will present 10 Linux-based mobile OSs other than Android, and these aren’t even all that exist.
The two mobile platforms with the most apps are Google’s Android with around 95,000 apps, and Apple’s iOS with around 250,000 apps.
Those are impressive numbers, but this article isn’t about the sheer number of apps available. Instead, we wanted to focus on a very interesting distinction between the two platforms: The radical difference in the ratio between free and paid apps.
Not to beat a dead horse, but why didn’t Apple think of this…? 
In this post we show you the ultimate, high-tech solution to a dilemma that the Media have been discussing for weeks now; the iPhone antenna “death grip”.
Remember, you saw it here first.
