This past week has been a pretty active one for the mobile sector, with the most prominent story being the highly anticipated partnership between Verizon Wireless and Apple.  It is to have a considerable impact on the sales of mobile phones across the U.S., and will be a game changer for Verizon, Apple and especially AT&T (though not in a good way).

According to sources, the new phone on which Apple has been working since 2010 is a CDMA conversion of Apple’s existing technology, and will be out on the market staring with the 10^th of February 2011.  It will feature a 16GB memory, but, because of the price (approximately $200), sales are not expected to reach overwhelming numbers.

In 2009, Apple filled in a patent application for a small, low-powered solar array for mobile devices,  with an eco-friendly solution of portable devices and mobile phones running out of power. This could be a breakthrough technology, but also a means cash savings–roughly $100 is spent monthly for charging devices.

The mobile advertising network, Millennial Media, has proclaimed Android to be the winner of the 2-month tie with Apple’s iOS, this being the first time Android beats Apple as the largest smartphone on the Millennial network. Android scored an 8 percent increase month-over-month, and a 46 percent impression rate. On the other hand, Apple has a 32 percent share of the market. While Android is beginning to win big, Apple retained its top position for mobile manufacturers, being closely followed by HTC and LG, which witnessed a 9 and 2 percent increase respectively in December 2010.

All in all, Android is investing a serious effort in developing apps such as Google Translation that translates from one language to another, converting in real time.  Ther’es also the update on the YouTube mobile app, which now offers music videos from Veoh and reached a major milestone of 200 million daily views.  Goggles 1.3 that recognizes barcodes and print ads from major US magazines and newspapers posted from August 2010 until now.  The app will present results such as product reviews, check in-store availability and compare prices, without having to press any button.

App are an expanding industry at the moment, as Appcelerator has expanded its team and expects to continue its growth spurt to keep pace with ongoing demand for intuitive, feature-rich applications for mobile, tablet and desktop platforms.

Despite the attention the mobile sector is having, mobile devices  are still vulnerable to malware attacks according to this week’s BitDefender’s reveal of a Facebook scam downloading worms to users devices, out of which 24% were mobile devices.