As if it wasn't obvious enough already that the smartphone had arrived, new numbers released on Friday confirmed what we already suspected - everyone is switching to smartphones.
According to the latest analytics from Strategy Analytics, not only were there a whole lot of smartphones shipped during 2012, but last year was also a record setting 12 months for the increasingly popular devices.
Some 700 million smartphones were shipped out in 2012, which was a 43 percent increase over 2011's numbers.
To make matters even more impressive, those numbers were possible with the European and North American growth slowing to just 43 percent from 2011's 64 percent.
No surprise
Quarter after quarter, Samsung consistently showed it was the manufacturer to beat, which is why it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn Samsung shipped a record 213 million smartphones in 2012.
Just so we're all clear on how impressive Samsung's new record was, the previous record holder (Nokia) manged just less than half of that with 100 million units shipped in 2010.
The Galaxy S3 alone sold as many units this year as Nokia had shipped all of 2010.
That insanely large number allowed Sammy to capture 30 percent of the overall market, and gave the manufacturer a nice lead on both second-place Apple (19 percent) and third place Nokia (5 percent).
Best of the rest
Despite Samsung's ridiculous year, both Apple and Nokia more than did their fair share of shipments during 2012.
Thanks in large part to the success of the iPhone 5, Apple was able to increase its shipments by 46 percent, which equated to 135.8 million units.
Even though Nokia may have fallen of the pace a bit during 2012, its 35 million smartphones shipped was still good enough to capture a place on the pedestal.
Unfortunately, what Samsung gained in market share, Nokia lost, as the company's 15.8 percent stake in 2011 dropped to just 5 percent.
Even with the Lumia 920 and its other Windows Phone 8 devices, Nokia just could muster enough traction to hang with the leader of the pack.
Every other manufacturer combined tallied just 316.3 million units shipped (a 45.2 percent share), which the top three easily surpassed.
2013 should prove to be an interesting year for smartphones, as many of those 2010 contracts will have expired, meaning consumers will be looking to devices like the Galaxy S4, iPhone 5S, and Sony's Xperia Z to replace aging phones.
Whether or not such an incredible amount of smartphones will be shipped again remains to be seen.
Nokia has updated its Music app for Lumia phones with a new premium subscription option it is calling Music+.
For just €3.99/$3.99 a month, users of the existing Nokia Music streaming service can upgrade to Music+, which gives them unlimited skips in the Mix Radio portion and unlimited downloads for offline playback.
The service also brings in audio at a higher quality and karaoke-style lyric sheets for the song users are currently listening to.
Users will also be able to stream music from a web browser, making Music+ a suitable Spotify alternative on both desktop and mobile.
Mix Radio stays in tact
Non-premium subscribers will still be able to access the 17m tracks already available through Mix Radio, which brings over 150 specially curated playlists and the opportunity for users to create custom playlists from the library.
Jyrki Rosenberg, VP Entertainment at Nokia, told the Nokia conversation blog: "It's the only smartphone music service out there offering access to millions of songs out of the box without the need to sign up, sign in, or suffer adverts in between enjoying the music.
"When you add in the ability to skip songs and save playlists for offline uses like the tube, you have something unique.
"This is for people who care enough about music to pay something for more quality and choice, but don't want to pay €9.99 monthly."
The new Music+ app will roll out in the next couple of weeks throughout the US and European territories.
Another day, another Samsung Galaxy S4 rumour and this time it's another press image claiming to be the hotly anticipated smartphone.
The image in question has been chilling out on Picasa for over a month with the folks over a BGR stumbling across it recently, and it shows a handset which is less rounded than the current Samsung Galaxy S3.
When the Galaxy S3 was launched some eyebrows were raised over its design as the rather squared look of the Samsung Galaxy S2 had been radically overhauled for a smooth, more rounded affair.
When two become one
According to this latest image leak the Galaxy S4 will take design cues from both handsets to form an aesthetical compromise between the two.
Another thing to note on this image is the date shown of the phone's display – Monday April 22 - which could be the launch event or Galaxy S4 release date, with several other reports pointing towards action in April.
As with all the image leaks running up to a handset's launch there's no guarantee that this is a genuine snap, it's more likely a Photoshop forgery but we won't know for sure until the Samsung Galaxy S4 is unveiled.
It's official: Nokia's 808 PureView is the last of the firm's Symbian handsets.
Symbian has been on death row for a while - we reported that Nokia had put it into "maintenance mode" back in October, and at the beginning of 2012 Nokia's then-new boss Stephen Elop said it had "competitive challenges that there was [no way to solve]" - but its demise was only confirmed this week during Nokia's latest earnings announcement.
As The Telegraph reports, Nokia had previously said that "Q4 2012 was 'the last meaningful quarter for Symbian'", and this week it confirmed that "The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia."
We won't miss it - Symbian's been looking rather dated since the arrival of the iPhone OS in 2007, never mind the latest iOS, Android and Windows Phone variants we have today - but that doesn't mean we won't wave it a fond farewell. We've gone through an awful lot of Symbian phones over the years.
Nokia is now concentrating on Windows Phone
Where Symbian came from
Symbian came from another firm we have fond memories of: Psion, whose Organiser computers were powerful and futuristic.
Well, they were at the time. In the late 1990s Psion Software joined forces with Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson to create Symbian from its EPOC OS. Symbian made multiple products - S60 for Nokia, UIQ for Sony Ericsson - and until the iPhone came along, it powered some of the tastiest handsets the world had ever seen.
Remember the Nokia N95 or its Communicator mini-laptop, Sony Ericsson's P990i or W810i? I had one of those latter ones, and at the time having a fully-fledged MP3 WalkMan living inside my phone felt awfully high tech.
So what went wrong? It's easy to say "the iPhone did it", but while Apple undoubtedly benefited from Symbian's problems it didn't create them. As Psion's first employee Charles Davis told The Register in 2011, Symbian was plagued by disagreements. "Owner-licensees "went for maximum differentiation in the end - UIQ was completely different to Series 60. This hampered Symbian's ability to innovate, and it stopped the aftermarket. We could have had an App Store 10 or five years before Apple."
Symbian grew messy. When Cisco considered adopting it, they discovered that not only did Symbian come in multiple, incompatible versions, but that - as Davis recalled - "we hadn't sorted out backwards compatibility at that time so apps written for Symbian 7 wouldn't work on Symbian 8." Cisco decided to go elsewhere.
The burning platform
Despite its many partners Symbian's one true friend was Nokia, especially outside Japan - but Nokia neglected what Stephen Elop would later describe as a "burning platform", failing to take the iPhone threat seriously enough quickly enough, inventing but not shipping devices awfully like today's iPhones and iPads and getting bogged down in bickering and bureaucracy.
As one designed told the WSJ: "You were spending more time fighting politics than doing design." Qualcomm's CEO found that Nokia would spend so much time assessing potential opportunities that by the time it made a decision, "the opportunity often just went away."
There's a truism that the most dangerous time for a company is when it's really successful, because that's when firms think nothing can touch them. IBM suffered from it in the 80s, Microsoft in the 90s, and Nokia did it in the 2000s. In Nokia's case the disruptor was Apple: not only did it not see the threat coming, but when the iPhone actually arrived it still didn't see it as a real danger.
MeeGo was a failed attempt at Nokia developing its own successor to Symbian
Nokia's focus was on dumbphones, because that's where the money was. It isn't there any more.
Whether you see Stephen Elop as Nokia's saviour or the architect of its downfall, it was clear from his "burning platform" memo that Symbian's days were numbered. Writing specifically about Symbian, Elop said it was "an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop" that was hindering Nokia's ability to "take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead."
Elop pulled the trigger, but what really killed Symbian was Nokia's belief that the smartphone space was a war of devices. It wasn't.
As Elop explained, "The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem."
In Symbian, Nokia had an OS - but what it didn't have was time to build an ecosystem to rival Apple and Google. Elop believed that building one around Symbian would take more time than Nokia could afford, so he bet on Microsoft's ecosystem instead. It's too early to say whether the move saved Nokia, but it certainly signed Symbian's death warrant.
It wasn't a bad year for iPlayer in 2012, with the BBC's on-demand service raking in more requests for TV programmes than ever before.
For the first time, the humble PC fell to less than half of all total iPlayer requests in December 2012 as mobiles and tablets took centre stage.
The nation as a whole seems to be fully embracing the whole iPlayer thing, with Brits spending 34 per cent more time watching TV shows in iPlayer than ever before, and a giant 177 per cent leap in people accessing the service from mobiles and tablets.
Downloads
Downloads of the iPlayer mobile apps hit 14 million across the year, possibly helped along by the BBC's introduction of offline downloads in September 2012 - although it's only on iOS at the moment, it still garnered 10.8 million programme downloads.
The most popular show of the year was the Tim Berners-Lee-featuring Olympics Opening Ceremony industro-rave, which nabbed 3,326 million views on catch-up alone.
Other winners in the great iPlayer popularity contest were Top Gear, Sherlock, The Apprentice, Doctor Who and, against all the odds, The Voice UK.
And, proving that New Year's Day is the most tedious day of the year, January 1 2013 saw the most requests ever seen in 24 hours.
