Kik Messenger is a free cross-platform messaging service that works like the iPhone’s iMessage feature.

Android and iPhone smartphones together made up 82% of all such devices shipped to retailers in the first quarter of 2012, IDC said Thursday.

While you may have your phone with you all the time, the reality is that for the most part it just sits in your pocket doing nothing.

Nokia is on a roll with the Lumia phones this year and today the company announced the Lumia 808 PureView and the Lumia 610. The Lumia 808 is a camera-centric Symbian phone while the Lumia 610 is an inexpensive Windows 7 Phone.

The most spectacular part of Nokia's presentation Sunday at Mobile World Congress was the unveiling of a new super imaging system, a sensor -- developed with Toshiba and other Nokia partners, coupled with Carl Zeiss optics -- that can capture 41 megapixels.

Nokia has released its first teaser video leading up to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, hinting at a new camera-centric announcement.

When I learned that Nokia would be teaming up with Microsoft for the next generation of Windows Phones, I was very excited. Nokia phones have a long-standing reputation for high quality, durability, and solid specs, but they've been held back by a stale operating system, Symbian. Enter the Nokia Lumia 710 for T-Mobile ($US50 with a new two-year contract; price as of January 5, 2012), the Finnish handset maker's first Windows Phone in the US.

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Nokia may sell more cellphones than any other company in the world, but it's been all but excluded from the United States for years -- and it's seen its global sales steadily shrink as the iPhone and Android smartphones have become the darlings of buyers in an increasing number of countries. Nokia's relevance has been fast receding, and its Symbian, Maemo, and MeeGo efforts became a pattern of failure for a company that just didn't get it. In response, a year ago, Nokia bet its future largely on Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's answer to Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when Finland was at the center of the cell phone universe. As cell phones overtook pagers, then smartphones overtook cell phones, Nokia was the hottest company in the industry.

With so much chatter about tablets this year, you might think that the handheld, rectangular devices being unveiled represent a significant innovation. The reality is that so much of what we're seeing is not a whole lot different than what we saw in previous years; these products offer only a few new twists. But those new twists could make the difference between tablets' remaining a niche item and their finally busting out to the mass market in a meaningful way.

Unlike the iPhone and products based on Google's Android OS, Symbian's user interface hasn't been developed for smartphones with touchscreens. But that is about to change, said Lee Williams, executive director at the Symbian Foundation, who along with his colleagues gathered at the Symbian Exchange & Exposition on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Palm Pre, iPhone, and Android browsers were designed specifically for touchscreen phones. In contrast, the S60 browser that Nokia's touchscreen phones use goes back to an older S60 interface that did not focus on touchscreen use. This fact may explain some of the S60 browser's lingering limitations.

Does the world need another smartphone operating system? Apple's iPhone OS is still booming; Google's Android is increasingly promising; and three longtime contenders--Microsoft's Windows Mobile, RIM's BlackBerry OS, and Symbian's S60--are undergoing serious renovation to keep up with the times.

The Palm Pre and the Apple iPhone 3G S are the smartphone standouts of 2009, but they're not the only news. Operating systems are receiving updates, new devices are debuting, and app stores are growing by the day. Here's what to look for from the six big operating systems in smartphones today.