The largest handset maker in the world, Nokia, has taken another step forward in its battle against iPhone maker Apple by reporting Q4 profits that beat all expectations. Despite the ongoing popularity of the iPhone, Nokia’s smartphones such as the N900 and the N97 have proved exceedingly popular and have increased the company’s market share to 39% from 37%. Even the release of Apple’s new iPad won’t detract from Nokia’s joy at this.

Cisco Systems has issued a warning to companies using the Unified MeetingPlace tool for conferencing, advising them to update their systems as four vulnerabilities have been found in the Unified MeetingPlace Unified Communications solution. Cisco has said that it has released solutions to fix versions 5, 6 and 7 of the Unified MeetingPlace tool and no other products show signs of unauthorised access vulnerabilities.

Samsung has just released its first batch of e-reader handhelds in Europe, following in the new trend that has seen an explosion of e-readers across the market. Samsung is reporting a lot of interest in its 6 inch and 9.7 inch e-readers – particularly from the education sector which funds the purchase of new technology but not books. Samsung joins the ranks of Amazon, LG, Bookeen and more recently Apple in the e-reader and e-books market. Sadly it seems as though the days of browsing in bookstores are over.

Shares fell for Polycom this week as investors in the company begin to speculate on how Polycom’s bottom line will be affected by the rampant spending on marketing that the company has recently indulged in. Polycom has long since been planning to increase its sales and marketing strategies and it has expectations of an 11% operating margin in the first quarter to achieve this. Let’s hope the spending sees results!

The co-founder of micro-blogging site Twitter, Evan Williams, has said that the company is currently working on some ‘interesting hacks’ in order to countermand internet censorship by foreign governments. Twitter has suffered censorship in both China and Iran and Evans says that this goes against everything that Twitter stands for. If Twitter can indeed create hacks that can negate censorship, they’re going to be extremely popular – even more so than usual!

Microsoft Corp., has joined other large companies such as Cisco Systems, McAfee and Symantec in becoming part of RPX Corp., a relatively new company that aggregates intellectual property in order to protect its customers from ‘patent trolls.’ Patent trolls of course being smaller firms that buy patents in order to sue big companies for infringement upon the patents. Recently, patent infringement cases against larger companies have become more common, so a company like RPX Corp. is in great demand.

The City of Manchester is to get a huge boost to next generation networks after fibre network providers have been handed a contract to deploy fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) to 1,000 homes in Manchester and 500 businesses.

Over the next year, Manchester people should be able to benefit from upload and download capacities of 100 Mbps as the fibre network is rolled out. Initial plans are to lay the network next to a gas line in order to minimise risk of breakage. A great time the people of Manchester!

Yesterday (27.01.10) saw Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc unveil the long talked about iPad, a new gadget that Apple hopes will take the world by storm…just like the iPhone did.

Somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone, the iPad is a 9.7inch touchscreen tablet that can run virtually all of the current iPhone apps, connect to the internet, play games and films – the device even has an iBook electronic reader service!

Price expectations were around the $1000 mark (around £617) and Steve Jobs – ever the showman – waited until speculation was rife before he announced the price (for the most basic iPad at 16GB) of $499 (around £308). No matter which way you look at it, it’s a bargain. AT&T will be providing the data deals for the iPad and it should be going on sale very soon. I predict a hit.

Popular belief was that fixed line telecoms were the telecoms of another era, no longer relevant to our new age of smartphones and netbooks and dongles. However, with O2’s move into the fixed line market, maybe we haven’t seen the last of broadband at home and landlines.

Whether intentional or simply unavoidable, the move into the market puts O2 once again in direct competition with BT of which it was once a part. Maybe it’s a simple as a move made in chess – you start selling mobiles and we’ll start selling fixed lines. Who knows. The one thing we do know, is that O2 has predicted an optimistic estimate of 1 million broadband customers by the years end. Time will tell.

The Senior Vice President of global sales and marketing for Avaya, Todd Abbott, has come forward to say that while Avaya has no plans for an initial public offering as of yet, an IPO could be on the cards in the future. Avaya, the American comms equipment manufacturer, is currently owned by two private firms. Avaya has recently completed the strategic acquisition of Nortel Network’s enterprise solutions which will help strengthen its portfolio.