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According to Canalys Smart Phone Analysis services, the smartphone market grew 64 percent globally year-on-year (YoY) for the Q2 2010, with Nokia remaining the worldwide leader.

Nokia, long the world's biggest phone seller, shipped 23.8 million phones during the quarter, good for 38 percent share of the global market. The vendor saw 41 percent growth YoY.

While 41 percent growth is strong by any standard, it is important to note that that number fell well below the overall market growth of 64 percent, and well below the growth of Android and Apple.

For the quarter, Android saw a ridiculous 886 percent growth, with Apple seeing 61 percent growth. U.S. market leader RIM saw 41 percent growth for their BlackBerry devices.

HTC, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG all offer Android devices.

Bloomberg has reported today that social networking giant Facebook may delay its IPO (initial public offering) until 2012, giving founder Mark Zuckerberg extra time to gain users and boost revenue.

The news comes from three anonymous sources within Facebook who do note that Zuckerberg has board control and could push for the stock offering at any time, but would prefer to have another year of growth before all finances go public.

Facebook is currently valued at about $25 billion, although revenue was only around $800 million last year.

"The burden of being public has never been greater," says Kevin Landis of Firsthand Funds. "Zuckerberg doesn’t have to put his name at the bottom of four 10-Q statements every year and attest that everything in there is true or else he’s responsible. The minute it’s public, he does."

Zuckerberg has said simply that the company will go public "when it makes sense" to.

The iPhone Dev Team has released the first official iPhone 4 jailbreak this week, using a browser-based exploit.

However, some of the users that have jailbroken their device has reported broken MMS and broken FaceTime.

Hacker "comex" released the option via jailbreakme.com, and visitors to the site on their iPhone 4 devices can start the jailbreaking process right from their phone browser.

The iPhone Dev Team's hack is the first for the device, despite hacker Geohot's claims to an iPhone 4 jailbreak last month.

As a note, iPads running iOS 3.2.1 will not be able to jailbreak their devices.

Making this jailbreak different than pretty much every other one before it, is the fact that it is completely browser-based, using the Apple Safari browser.

The hack comes a week after the U.S. Library of Congress officially made jailbreaking legal.

Record label representatives have been caught issuing DMCA takedown notices for Radiohead's In Rainbows album despite apparently not having any legal standing to do so.

Radiohead released In Rainbows online in 2007 after severing their relationship with EMI. It was initially offered online, with downloaders allowed to choose their own price - even if they chose to pay nothing.

The DMCA's takedown provision allows rights holders or their agents to have infringing content taken down by service providers. But the rights in question would have to be for digital distribution.

A few months after it's initial online release, the band made a distribution deal with a RIAA member, ATO Records, which doesn't seem to include any digital distribution (ie download) rights.

In fact it appears that Warner/Chappell Music, a publishing company owned by Warner Music Group, is contracted to be Radiohead's representative in digital licensing. Although public details of the arrangement are somewhat vague, Last.fm lists the company as the label for In Rainbows.

A Twitter user in Tokyo has posted the 20 billionth tweet in the history of the micro-blogging site, four years after the service launched.

The popularity of the service has grown exponentially over the past year, with the 10 billion mark being hit just five months ago.

15 million was hit in June, riding the heels of the World Cup tournament's huge popularity.

Twitter blogged recently that the service adds 300,000 new users every day, on top of the 120 million registered users it already has.

In February, the service said it was seeing 600 tweets per second, which moved to as high as 3000 a second during the World Cup. In 2007, when the site was still in its infancy, there were about 5000 tweets per day.

Sony has released their latest Q1 results, and for the quarter ended June 30th the company sold 2.4 million PlayStation 3 consoles.

Globally, the PS3 has now hit 38.1 million consoles sold, gaining strong momentum the longer the console is available.

In its first fiscal year of availability, 2006, Sony sold 3.5 million consoles. For the fiscal 2007, Sony sold 9.1 million units. For the fiscal 2008, the company sold 10.1 million units. In fiscal 2009, with the release of the slimmed down version of the console, Sony sold 13 million consoles.

For the fiscal 2010, Sony has said they plan to sell 15 million units.

While the Microsoft Xbox 360 had a one-year lead in the current-gen market, the PS3 is catching up, now down by just 3.6 million, according to the Examiner.

According to figures site AndroLib, the Android Market has seen 100,000 apps submitted since its debut, although there are still not 100,000 apps available in the store.

The site says 18,000 apps have been removed or been unpublished, leaving the active app count at somewhere over 82,000.

Last month, Google confirmed 75,000 apps in the Market.

AndroLib counts apps available in the U.S and internationally, as well as those submitted in those nations.

Said the site this weekend: "When Androlib launched in June 2009, barely 5,000 applications and games had been submitted to the Android Market. This number quickly grew overtime exponentially. By the end of 2009, it would cross 20,000. Today, we are happy to announce this number surpassed 100,000."

Motorola's heavily touted Droid 2 smartphone has been confirmed for an August 12th release date.

The date comes from an internal Verizon blog, which while unconfirmed, seems real.

Details are laid out about the smartphone in the leaked pages, as well, with the most notable being the launch-day addition of Android 2.2 Froyo. Android 2.2 includes 450 percent better performance, an improved browser, built-in Flash 10.1 support, and Apps2SD among other features.

Swype will also come pre-installed, giving users arguably the best virtual keypad typing system available.

The device has a 1GHz processor, a QWERTY keypad, 8GB onboard memory, and an 8GB microSD card.

Additionally, the phone will come pre-installed with a plethora of Verizon apps, Skype Mobile, NFL Mobile, Blockbuster, City ID and 3G Mobile Hotspot.

While there hasn't been too many complaints, a number of PlayStation 3 owners have complained since Friday that Sony's recent 3.41 firmware update has been crashing their console, or just won't install at all.

Sony has been quick to respond, saying the problem doesn't lie with the firmware update but instead with the user's individual hard drives.

Many users upgrade their standard Sony-issued hard drives, especially if they own PS3s that started with tiny 20GB or 40GB HDDs.

If you are having trouble, Sony has suggested switching back to your original PS3 HDD to get the update, first.

Says Sony: "We apologize for any inconvenience you are experiencing with upgrading Internal Hard Disc Drive (for PlayStation3) on your PlayStation(R)3 computer entertainment system. The information available to our Consumer Services Department does not suggest that this is a problem PlayStation(R) owners are likely to experience when upgrading the HDD with 3.41update. Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) strongly supports the quality of its products and backs them with full confidence."

Earlier this week a company called Lookout showed how several Android wallpaper apps were accessing user information, including phone number, subscriber identification, voicemail password, browsing history, text messages & the phone’s SIM card number.

The claims were made during a presentation at this week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

In a number of interviews since then the developer, Jackeey Wu, has released a statement denying most of these claims and Lookout has since agreed that only the phone number, subscriber identification & voicemail password (when stored on the phone) were accessed and sent to Wu's server in China.

Wu stated, "I collected the screen size to return more suitable wallpaper for the phone. More and More users emailed me telling that they love my wallpaper apps so much, because that even “Background” can’t well suited the phone’s screen. I also collected device id,phone number and subscriber id, it has no relationship with user data. There are few apps in Android market has the favorites feature. Many users suggest that I should provide the feature so I use the these to identify the device, so they can favorite the wallpapers more conveniently, and resume his favorites after system resetting or changing the phone."

Samsung has said it will introduce a tablet this quarter running Google's Android operating system, joining the stables of tech firms releasing tablets by the end of the year.

Nokia, LG, HP and RIM have confirmed, or unconfirmed tablets set for release by the end of the year, running either Android, WebOS or BlackBerry operating systems.

The market leader, the Apple iPad, sold an astonishing 3 million units in its first 90 days.

Samsung's tablet will have a smaller 7-inch screen, but there are no other details available, not even what version of Android the device will ship with.

LG will launch its Android tablet in the Q4, RIM will release its BlackBerry tablet in the Q4, and Microsoft has said it hopes to release Windows 7 tablets in the Q4, as well.

A web based alternative to the iPhone app store called OpenAppMkt opened today. Instead of native iOS apps, it offers a selection of HTML apps.

To use it you need to install their client, which you can do directly from the OpenAppMkt website.

According to BusinessWeek, RIM is preparing to release its still unconfirmed BlackPad tablet in November.

Earlier in the week, the smartphone company registered BlackPad.com, with the domain being purchased by CSC, a company that specializes in corporate branding, on behalf of RIM.

The two sources claim the BlackPad will have a 9.7-inch screen, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tech that will allow users to connect to the Web via their BlackBerry smartphones.

"They can’t wait for a second generation of devices from Apple or they’ll fall too far behind," says Rodman and Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar.

Pricing will be "in line" with that of the iPad, which begins at $500 USD.

During his company's latest quarterly earnings conference call, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke about the company's plans for tablets in the near future, but remained very scant on the details.

The company posted its best quarter ever last week, but has been openly criticized for its lack of strategy in the tablet market, as well as in other consumer businesses.

When asked specifically about tablets, Ballmer said Windows has been available on tablets and slates for years, with constant sales. However, none of Microsoft's devices have ever come close to the buzz created by Apple's iPad.

"Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a product," Ballmer said, admitting that "they've certainly sold more than I'd like them to sell."

"For us, the job is to say we have a lot of [intellectual property] and software and we've done a lot of work on ink and touch," he continued, via PCW. "We have got to make things happen. Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we have to with Windows 7 on slates. We're in the process of doing that as we speak."

Earlier this week, Yahoo Japan, the biggest portal in the nation, said it would being using Google's search engine to power its search instead of following Yahoo Inc.'s decision to use Microsoft's Bing for search.

Microsoft is clearly not happy with the decision.

The software giant has said today it plans to argue before Japan's Fair Trade Commission that the deal is anti-competitive, as it would give Google almost 100 percent of the search market in the region.

Japan is the world's third-largest market for search queries.

The FTC has already said the deal does not violate anti-monopoly laws in the nation.

Yahoo Japan has 57 percent search market share in the country while Google has 37. Microsoft has 2.8 percent.