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.
Things are looking up over at Nokia as the Finnish firm posted a healthy profit for the final quarter of 2012.
Nokia managed to rack up €8.04 billion (around £6.76 billion/$10.7 billion) of profit during the last three months of 2012, which is 33 per cent up on the same period in 2011 and a massive 714 per cent gain on the third quarter in 2012.
The firm also highlights that it experienced a turbulent start to the year and this is reflected in its annual profit dipping 93 per cent year-on-year between '11 and '12.
Lumia is shifting
When it comes down to device sales Nokia shifted 4.4 million Lumia handsets - including the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 - in the final quarter of last year which sounds impressive until you compare it to the competition.
In the same period Apple managed to sell 47.8 million iPhones – which puts Nokia's position in the market into its true perspective.
The upturn at the end of 2012 is a positive sign for the firm and Windows Phone – which Nokia now relies solely on for its smartphones – and we hope it can continue this upwards trend in 2013.
We could be on the brink of a new industrial revolution, and it's all down to a single layer of carbon atoms called Graphene.
Graphene is the thinnest, strongest, lightest, stiffest material ever made, and if it lives up to its potential it could change pretty much everything.
Why graphene is exciting
Graphene can do almost anything bar making you a better dancer or more skilful in bed. Fancy a superconductor that works at room temperature? Graphene can do that. Want to make bendy OLED touchscreens, or print solar cells, or make something harder than diamond? Or make thin, light structures that are 200 times stronger than ones made from steel? Graphene's good for all that too.
Speaking to Nature magazine, graphene expert and Nobel laureate Andre Geim explained: "It's the thinnest possible material you can imagine. It also has the largest surface-to-weight ratio: with one gram of graphene you can cover several football pitches... it's also the strongest material ever measured; it's the stiffest material we know; it's the most stretchable crystal. That's not the full list of superlatives, but it's pretty impressive."
Conspiracy theorists believe that graphene is a material left on Earth by - or rather, stolen from - space aliens. The theory reckons it's no coincidence that the theory behind graphene was first published in 1947, just when the US was dismantling UFOs in Roswell.
There's a bit of a graphene gold rush
According to figures from Cambridge Intellectual Property, in 2012 there were an extraordinary 7,351 graphene patents and patent applications, with the majority - 2,200 - filed by Chinese institutions and corporations.
The US is next with 1,754 patents, but while the UK kicked off the whole frenzy by publishing the first significant research back in 2004, it's far behind in the patent stakes: it only filed 54. That might explain why chancellor George Osborne has actually decided to spend some money for once: the UK government is supporting graphene research to the tune of £60 million.
Here's an interesting nugget spotted by the Cambridge IP: the biggest single corporate patent holder is Samsung, with 407 patents to IBM's 134.
Uses for graphene are starting to snowball
Graphene will make some people very rich, and we're already seeing practical uses of the technology: University of Manchester researchers have developed a graphene transistor that could enable much faster computing, while other research is helping us understand the substance's electrical and magnetic behaviour.
Graphene is being used to make "extremely efficient" flexible OLEDs for displays, highly conductive nanomaterials for the electronics industry and exceptionally powerful tennis rackets, and some people want to use it to make lightning-powered skyscrapers or to replace carbon fibre in cars and other vehicles.
We're not finished yet. It's also being used to make better batteries, and some people reckon it might even stop the next Lance Armstrong from getting away with doping: researchers are working on a system that incorporates graphene "to detect a single molecule of a drug in a few minutes".
It could be great for the environment
Today's vehicles, even electric ones, still face the same old problem: cars, trucks and trains are heavy, and pushing something heavy around the place at high speed uses enormous amounts of energy. Cutting weight is a priority, and today's vehicles are increasingly using aluminium and carbon fibre to achieve that.
Graphene would make those vehicles' weight savings look insignificant, ushering in an era of super-light transport that uses considerably less energy to start, steer and stop.
It has other environmental uses too: scientists at Moscow State University and Rice University have found that graphene is very good at extracting radioactive materials from water. They believe that it could be used to clean up nuclear accidents, for more efficient mining of rare metals, or for oil extraction.
Graphene is coming sooner rather than later
Firms such as Samsung and Nokia are getting into graphene in a big way, with the first commercial products based on the material due in 2013 or 2014.
As Geim told Nature, when he was in South Korea he was "shown a graphene roadmap, compiled by Samsung. On this roadmap were approximately 50 dots, corresponding to particular applications. One of the closest applications with a reasonable market value was a flexible touchscreen. Samsung expects something within two to three years." That was three years ago.
Is graphene being overhyped?
Writing in The Guardian, Philip Ball urges caution. While so-called miracle materials "can still grab headlines and conjure up utopian visions", they don't always deliver.
"High-temperature superconductors, which nabbed a Nobel in 1987, would give us Maglev trains and loss-free power lines. Carbon nanotubes... would anchor a space elevator and transform microelectronics. These things haven't materialised", he points out.
Graphene is banging around your head to the tune of Dolly Parton's 'Jolene'
And if it wasn't, it probably is now. Sorry about that.
