Drama dominates mobile in 2011

It was an exciting year in the mobile wireless market, one full of deal making and wonderful drama.

Google said it would buy Motorola's wireless division. Nokia ditched Symbian for Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. Sony took control of Sony Ericsson.

Apple, meanwhile, squabbled with everyone in court over patents. Samsung soared to the top of smartphone market, surpassing Apple as the number-one smartphone maker in the world. HP dumped webOS. And poor Research In Motion (RIM) stumbled, and then stumbled some more, as its Playbook tablet faltered, its new smartphones were delayed, and its network experienced major outages.

Google buys Motorola

Jaws dropped when Google coughed up US$12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility in a deal that simultaneously lends some legal stability to the Android world while shaking up the competitive landscape.

Google said that it primarily sought Motorola for its war chest of patents — 17,000 registered and 7500 pending — and not necessarily to get into handset business. That bodes well for other Android partners, many of which mustered up statements of support for the deal, and have been under attack by Apple.

But some fear that Motorola, which will run as a separate business owned by Google, will have an unfair advantage, and get the latest Android updates and better support. Google, for its part, says it will remain a neutral partner when it comes to Android. Of course, the deal isn't done yet. Last week, European regulators put the transaction on hold for further review.

Nokia and Microsoft jump in together

Faced with increasing competition from Google Android and Apple's iPhone, Nokia and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in March that would help the companies combine forces. Nokia announced that it is abandoning its Symbian operating systems for its smartphones, and will instead develop all future smartphones using the Windows Phone platform.

The strategy shift stalled Nokia for several months, but the company managed to show off its first Windows Phone devices in October at an event in London. The new Lumia series phones first went on sale in Europe.

The success of the Nokia/Microsoft partnership is critical for the survival of both companies, and it will be a story worth following in 2012.

Patent wars flare up

Apple set off the recent spate of legal wrangling with its lawsuit against HTC last year, but things really picked up steam when it went after Samsung Electronics. It was an awkward move, given the Korean electronics giant also supplies parts for the iPhone and the iPad, but it underscored the seriousness of Apple's charge against Android.

What followed was a marathon of lawsuits and countersuits between Apple and several Android makers in courts around the world. Most recently, the companies have taken to seeking temporary product bans with mixed success. Apple managed to get a ban placed on Samsung's Galaxy Tab in Australia before it was recently overturned and Samsung had redesigned the Tab slightly to get around a ban in Germany.

With so many suits, it's sort of amazing that almost no progress was made, except, of course, for driving Google to buy Motorola (see above).

RIM has one miserable year

RIM's public relations team must have been working overtime after the year that the company has had. The list of missteps is too large to fully list, but here are some of the biggies: the global outage that lasted two days; a loss of market share to rivals Android and Apple iOS; and the disappearance of nearly three quarters of its market value over the past year.

In a rare highlight, RIM did issue a badly needed update to its flagship Bold smartphone, which actually won critical praise. Unfortunately, RIM also released a number of other BlackBerry phones, which didn't fare so well with reviewers or consumers.

HP dumps webOS

Yes, webOS lives on in open-source form, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) has expressed a willingness to continue supporting it, but let's face it: webOS is done. The software, critically lauded even back in the Palm days, was already on life support when HP acquired the company last year, but now-former HP CEO Leo Apotheker pulled the plug when he announced a broad shift of the company into a business services provider, and away from all things consumer.

Apotheker and his plans were shortly after thrown out of the company, but webOS was never brought back into the fold, and now lives on in the wilds of the open-source world.

HP's poor handling of webOS did lead to the great TouchPad fire sale, in which Harvey Norman liquidated its stock at $98 per tablet, leaving the retailer out of pocket by over $300 per unit.

Samsung takes the smartphone crown

It's been a quick ascent for Samsung Electronics, a company that was late to the game with smartphones, and which had a lacklustre offering early on. But after steady improvement and a drum beat-like consistent roll-out of products, growing carrier support and an established flagship line in the Galaxy S, Samsung overtook Apple as the top smartphone vendor in the world in the third quarter.

Rather than go after a single carrier with a flagship phone, Samsung has been able to dominate the market by being virtually ubiquitous. In addition to a line-up of more affordable smartphones, its top-tier Galaxy S II was a hit around the world.

Sony says enough; takes control of Sony Ericsson

Sony made the bet that it could make better phones by itself, led to disappointing sales of the device. After Sony announced the move, it promised a tighter integration with its other products, which hopefully means a phone that's more than just PlayStation certified — whatever that means.

Via CNET