Originally posted by Darren at Playfool.com

In this period, RIM was still the leading mobile smartphone platform, dropping from 42.1% to 41.7% market share. It was followed by Apple which somewhat surprisingly dropped from 25.4% to 24.4% and Microsoft which dropped from 15.1% to 13.2%. Android was fourth on the list, but it rose from 9% to 13% market share in this same period. It was followed by Palm which dropped from 5.4% to 4.8% market share.

One has to take into account that these numbers are relative; most smartphone platforms actually gained subscribers as the smartphone market overall grew 8.1%, with 49.1 million people in the U.S. owning smartphones during this period. Still, Android is growing faster – much faster – than its competitors at this point.

As far as top mobile manufacturers go, Samsung grabbed the first place, growing from 21.4% to 22.4% market share. It was followed by LG, RIM, Motorola and Nokia, all of which lost a small chunk of their share, with the exception of RIM which grew from 8.2% to 8.7%.

Known widely for the ambitious/crazy Optimus Maximus, the first keyboard with OLED screens for keys, Russian design house Art Lebedev has just unveiled its successor, Optimus Popularis. It’s a looker.

Details don’t extend much beyond what we can see here: the key caps are now practically all screen, whereas on the Maximus, a border frame cut down on the size of the visible portion. Also new is an overall much sleeker design, and a neat display bar that is home to several nicely designed widget readouts.

Pricing here is “under $1,000,” but I wouldn’t expect it to be too far under.

A social media marketing company called Syncapse surveyed [PDF link] 4,000 people who have “Liked” the top 20 brands that have pages on Facebook and figured out exactly how valuable those “fans” are.

The study (“The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review”) estimates that someone who has Liked a brand will spend an average of $71.84 more each year on that brand’s products or services than will someone who has not Liked it on Facebook, for a total average annualized value of $136.38.

This method is very different than the one employed by Vitrue in another fan value study a month ago. Vitrue’s method valued fans by figuring out how much it would cost to buy advertising on a website to reach the same people.

Product spending was only one of six fan benefits that Syncapse studied. The others were loyalty, propensity to recommend, brand affinity (“perception and recall”), media value (efficiency of Facebook vs. other ways to reach consumers) and acquisition cost.

In most cases, the average fan was more valuable to the brand than the average non-fan, though results varied widely on an individual basis. For example, some fans spent no money at all on a brand and never recommend it to friends.

Note that this was just demonstrated as a correlation, nothing more. Nabbing someone as a Facebook fan hasn’t been proven to increase spending in this study. The study just demonstrates that people who become fans of brands are more likely to spend and evangelize. If they liked the brand enough to “Like” it on Facebook, they might have done those things anyway.

In the mobile browser world, the iPad has already surpassed both the Blackberry and Android devices in terms of use.  Granted, there are already 2 million+ iPads out in the world, and we’re talking about a device that touts a main use of consuming content, so that part isn’t terribly surprising.  But seeing it in black and white puts a new perspective onto things.

Here’s a simple but extremely useful solution using nothing more than a bulldog clip!!!

Clever cable holders. Via curled and feathered.