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.

In a bid to protect the Android ecosystem from encroaching patent infringement demands from competitors, Google agreed to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in its biggest deal to date. Google will buy Motorola Mobility for a 63 percent premium over its closing price on Friday at $40.00 per share in cash. The deal could add up to 19,000 employees to the search giant.

Google’s most explicit reason for the deal is that it needs to protect the Android ecosystem from what it says are increasing intellectual property attacks by rivals Microsoft and Apple. “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio,” Larry Page wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. The move comes just days after comments from Jha at an investor conference suggesting that Motorola was also looking at asking for licensing fees. Such licensing fees would unravel the alliances that Google has carefully built over the years, as Android would no longer be an effectively free OS. Handset makers would have to pay royalties, which might lower their margins and filter into final costs for consumers. With the deal Google would pick up 17,000 awarded patents and 7,000 filed patent applications.

As far as developers are concerned, this deal would mean a number of things:

1. Google’s Motorola unit could set the bar higher, with better integrated and designed Android phones: When Google partnered with Samsung and HTC to release the Nexus One and the Nexus S, the company wanted to set expectations for what a top-of-the-line Android phone should look and feel like. Before that (and sometimes still to this date), the loosely-controlled federation of handset makers and carriers around Android would ship devices with bloated and unnecessary software or that didn’t take full advantage of Android’s capabilities. With Motorola, Google gets the ability to design its hardware and software in concert, which should help fix many of the performance, design and UI issues it has had relative to iOS.

2. This ends up being a validation of Apple’s verticalized approach: With Google getting into the hardware business, this is a big acknowledgement of the benefits of Apple’s approach, which involves controlling as much as possible from procuring and designing parts to the end retail experience.

3. But this deal could backfire. There may be more urgency for competing OEMs like Samsung and HTC to diversify now, creating a window of opportunity for Microsoft or even an eventual Facebook OS someday: Companies like Samsung and HTC took big bets in relying on Android and now they’ll be competing directly with Google. Even though Google claims that the acquisition will not change Google’s commitment to running Android as an open platform, handset makers will want to at least have insurance of that. They may want to consider the Windows Phone operating system more strongly just as a hedge. Other players, like Facebook, which may eventually need to build an mobile operating system at some point in the near future, could also leverage this urgency.

Another of the biggest mobile game developers, PopCap Games, has proven it has the clout to get a deal with a device maker.

The gaming company, which agreed to be acquired by EA in a deal worth up to $1.3 billion and makes Bejeweled Blitz and Plants Vs. Zombies, will start having its titles come pre-installed on Sony Ericsson Android devices starting this summer.

The agreement comes at a time when many Android handset makers are trying to stand out amid a tidal wave of devices. And app developers that have created standout brands like PopCap or Angry Birds-maker Rovio promise to help differentiate their phones. Carriers are also doing similar deal with game-makers; AT&T recently signed one with Zynga to create a special shelf within Android Market featuring exclusive content.

In the PopCap-Sony Ericsson deal, Peggle, Chuzzle and Plants vs. Zombies will come embedded on Xperia phones. Consumers who buy the phones will get the full version of Chuzzle, while they’ll get Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies in unlimited trial mode. They’ll have the option of buying the full version.