Let’s have a recap on what had happened in the mobile pitch this week. The earliest news we took down was Nokia’s decision of shelving Ovi Mobile. The Espoo, Finland-based mobile giant is gravely disappointed by the poor performance of Symbian and MeeGo against competitors Android and iOS, despite a recent whiff of optimism. Dropping its two operating systems, Nokia will be taking on Microsoft to manufacture mobile operating systems for them. While all of Ovi’s existing services will be retained, it will be placed under Nokia’s established name and not in a separate company/service.

Nokia still holds majority of global mobile shares but it certainly cannot overlook the dramatic decline of its stakes. Indubitably, if the mobile giant does not do anything, it’s going to lose its grip on the market.  And the disturbing thing is, there’s a rumor initiated by Russian technology blogger Eldar Murtazin that Microsoft’s prepping to buy Nokia. I’m not saying this is unlikely, for it does sound kind of fishy that Microsoft acquired Skype for an insanely high price tag.  Sure enough though, if the Nokia acquisition materializes, Nokia won’t be Nokia anymore.

Equivalently disappointing for another mobile manufacturer, approximately a thousand Playbooks were found to be buggy and had to be retracted by RIM. Luckily, the devices were still in retails stores and were yet to be distributed to its consumers.

Nokia and RIM are on the ditch while Android, Amazon and Microsoft are excited about their latest updates. Android will be releasing version 3.1 of Honeycomb, which Google reported to be more flexible as it bridges the gap between smartphones and tablets. Meanwhile, Amazon leeches off the success of Google Android as it becomes the premier and exclusive hub of PopCap’s first games developed for Android. Also, Microsoft announced the 7.5 version of Mango which will be rolled out sometime late this year.

Riding on the wave of smartphone adoption, InMobi said mobile ad sector managed to increase its market by 17 percent. What do you expect? People loves their pocket-sized, rather bhandy devices.  The proliferation of mobile devices is the reason for the explosion of mobile data. Roger Strukhoff even cited how the Philippines population of 90 million people swap mobile phones like they would ballpoint pens. It’s also nice to know that, because more and more people own smartphones by the year, T-Mobile decided (finally) to make Wi-Fi calls free on its devices. Everybody’s been looking forward to this, and I personally think it’s about time.

While everybody seems to be happy about the rise of smartphones and the comfort they bring, the digital camera niche is on the verge of ‘extinction.’ Smartphones may not be able to compete head to head with traditional digital cameras in terms of quality, but this is an area most people will compromise.  With a limit to what digital cameras can do when compared to a smartphone, this particular technological corner is surely going to undergo massive changes from a manufacturing standpoint. Flip has already gone to the graveyard. Who’s next?