Flush with numerous smartphone services that it offers consumers who own its devices, Nokia will soon be better able to serve mobile marketers too. Today the Finnish mobile phone giant said it will purchase Motally, whose mobile analytics service offers in-application tracking and reporting and helps app-creators better develop their products according to the way users engage.

We’ve written about Motally, based in San Francisco, several times this year. Its import APIs allows for the uploading of bulk data directly to Motally for processing, making it especially useful for platform providers who want to send large quantities of data for analysis on behalf of their user base. Its two-way mobile app communications allow developers to make changes in real-time without having to resubmit their app to app stores and go through the strenuous process of re-approval. In short, Motally makes it possible for marketers to create the most effective mobile campaigns possible–and then measure their success.

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today published a report entitled “Prevailing Mobile In-Application Advertising Formats,” that looks at current and future trends for mobile ad formats and placement on a variety of platforms and devices.

The IAB fielded a simple survey to members who sell in-app ads, asking them to summarize the ad formats they currently support, across seven different platforms for mobile devices, including Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile.  Participating publishers in the survey included companies such as 4INFO, the Associated Press, CNN.com, Millennial Media and Pandora, just to name a few.

In terms of smartphone platforms, the IAB concluded that banner sizes are “most harmonious,” meaning the surest way to run a campaign across a majority of smartphone app platforms is to stick to the largest of the 6:1 Mobile Marketing Association mobile banner sizes, which is 300 x 50.  A majority of the participants in this survey support 300 x50 directly, and those that don’t generally have a size slightly larger where a 30 0x 50 will fit okay with black or white bars around it.

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ComScore today published data from its May 2010 “Mobile Subscriber Market Share” report, reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending May 2010 compared to the preceding three-month average.

The report ranks the top OEM handset providers and top smartphone OSs by market share, indicating that Samsung remains the top handset manufacturer overall with 22.4 percent market share, while RIM led among smartphone platforms with 41.7 percent market share.

For context, the report shows that for the 3 month average period ending in May, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices, while 49.1 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones.  After RIM, Apple comes in second in terms of smartphone market share with 24.4 percent and Microsoft comes in third with 13.2 percent.  Google saw significant growth during the period, up 4 percentage points to capture 13 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.

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Vision Mobile in conjunction with Telefonica Developer Communities recently published the results of a developer survey entitled “Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond,” in which more than 400 developers globally were surveyed to analyze mindshare and overall sentiment for the various mobile platforms.

The results of the survey were segmented into 8 major platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash Lite, and the mobile Web.  In terms of developer mindshare, the new research shows that Symbian and Java ME, which dominated the developer mindshare pool until 2008, have been superceded by the Android and iPhone platforms- big surprise, I know.

Despite Symbian remaining in the pole position in terms of smartphone market penetration, ‘out-shipping’ iPhone 4 to 1 and Android many-times to 1, the signs of dissatisfaction with the way the Symbian platform has evolved have long been evident.  The ecosystem evolving around the Android platform will likely make it the new Symbian in terms of reach and developer share very soon.  The iPhone, despite its enormous reach and prolific development community, will always be hindered by its closed-off nature in my opinion.

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Mobile phone sales continue to rise at substantial rates, according to new research by Gartner, with Smartphone sales exploding during the first quarter of 2010.

Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 314.7 million units during Q1 2010, representing a 17% increase from the same period in 2009, while smarpthone sales reached 54.3 million units, representing an increase of 48.7 % from the first quarter of 2009.  Not surprisingly, among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services- or in other words Apple’s iPhone OS and the Android platform.

Gartner attributes much of the growth in the mobile devices market to double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags.  “Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward,” explained Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.  ”We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China.”

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While the iPhone and Android platforms seem to garner all the attention in terms of mobile advertising these days, it’s the Symbian platform and feature phones in general that still reign supreme in terms of effective mobile advertising and CTR.

That was the primary finding in Smaato’s latest metrics report for April, which indicates Symbian and Feature Phones have bucked the global drop in click-through rates by posting noticeable growth.  In the US, Smaato’s metrics reveal that Symbian dominates the region in terms of CTR’s, coming in at 2.7x higher than its closest rival, Apple’s iPhone.

The data acts as further proof that there’s “more to mobile advertising than the iPhone,” as stated in the report, even in its largest market- the US.  Smaato uses a CTR index that’s based on 40 mobile ad networks and over 6 billion ad requests served through its Network of more than 4,000 registered mobile publishers.  The Index consists of the average CTR of all devices and is set to 100.

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Symbian, though always touting their open development concept, has been notoriously slow in providing a truly open source version of its mobile OS to developers.  That’s all changed, with Symbian’s announcement that they’ve finally released a fully open source version of its widely used OS, and it’s available now.

Symbian has always deemed themselves an open source mobile OS, but to access the so-called “open” source code, you had to pay for membership into the Symbian Foundation.  This has long been off-putting to developers used to the truly open source environment surrounding other open source projects- mainly the Android OS, where developers can do just about anything they want to customize it.

The new source code was released under an Eclipse Public License (EPL), which is similar to a General Public License (GPU), except it includes a few provision protecting Symbian’s patents and copyrights.  It still provides developers with unbridled freedom to modify the code as they see fit, while protecting IP that Symbian has honed so diligently over the years.

It’s obvious that Symbian sees the light that Android is shining in terms of the potential a fully open-sourced mobile OS can provide, and Symbian isn’t going to sit idle while Android enjoys the spotlight.  While Symbian revels in obscurity in the US, it’s still the most widely used and accepted mobile OS worldwide.  Symbian will undoubtedly use its position to take on Android, which is growing rapidly at the expense of Symbian and other so-called legacy OSs.

It should be interesting to see what happens from a development standpoint, and whether the “open-sourcing” of it’s code is relegated to being too little too soon for Symbian.