The Most Used Smartphone OS in the World is Symbian – Nokia’s Symbian operating system was the most popular smartphone OS in 2011, according to a report from StatCounter. The OS, used mainly on lower-end smartphones that are popular in South America, Africa and Asia accounted for 33.5 percent of the global market. Apple’s iOS was second with a 22.6 percent share, Android followed with 21.7 percent and BlackBerry’s share declined to 7.6 percent.

Samsung Most Popular Phone Manufacturer in US, Apple Gains Ground - According to ComScore’s latest U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share report, Samsung is the most popular OEM. In the past three months the manufacturer has increased its market share by 0.3 percent and now accounts for 25.6 percent of all mobile phones. In the same period of time Apple gained ground, increasing its market share by 1.4 percent to capture 11.2 percent of the handset market.

Christmas Day Boosts Mobile Shopping - Christmas Day was a busy day for shoppers according to IBM. The volume of online shopping conducted on the holiday jumped 16.4 percent year-on-year, with mobile device purchases rising more than 170 percent year-on-year. The most popular mobile device used to make online purchases was the iPad, accounting for 7 percent of the holiday sales.

Windows Phone Marketplace Passes 50,000 Apps – The Windows Phone marketplace is now adding new apps at a rate of 265 a day, according to All About Windows Phone. The market began the year with less than 10,000 apps, and has now published a total of 50,126 apps — an achievement that took it just under 14 months. By comparison the Android took 19 months to pass the 50,000 app mark, Blackberry 26 months and Apple 12 months.

Chillingo Moves to Windows Phone – EA’s mobile game publisher Chillingo has released its first game for the Windows phone marketplace, Spider Jack. The game is also available both on iOS and Android for $0.99.

HP Tried to Sell webOS for $1.2 Billion - VentureBeat is reporting that HP tried and failed to sell its assets in Palm and the webOS operating system for $1.2 billion dollars, an offer that was turned down by Amazon, Intel, Samsung and Facebook. HP eventually made webOS open source.

Christmas Was Big for the Kindle Fire – While it did not provide an exact number of units sold, Amazon has revealed that the Kindle Fire was the most gifted and most wished for product in its store this Christmas, and it was the top selling product in the UK, France, Spain and Italy. Earlier in the year the retailer boosted its suppliers orders for the tablet.

[Funding] Just.Me Nets $2.7 Million in Funding – Stealth startup Just.Me has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding for its as yet undefined all-in-one social management tool. The SEC filing did not disclose which companies participated in the funding round.