The rise in popularity of smartphones such as the iPhone and Android powered devices has been good news for poker fans as well, with more and more smartphone owners spending as much time playing games on their phones as talking on them. The net result is that more and more game makers are developing apps for smartphones, including a wide range of poker apps for mobile phones that let fans enjoy their favorite pastime no matter where they’re at. Read more

How about starting your Christmas countdown early? The Angry Birds Christmas edition, Angry Birds Seasons, hits the market today. I am pretty sure that Christmas is not an angry season but playing a fun game is definitely Christmas-like. Download the app and lets continue the battle in the spirit of Christmas. Click the QR code for the barcode link.

You’ve got the Motorola Droid X and want to flaunt that 4.3-inch screen? There’s no better way to do it other than with the official Droid X multimedia desktop dock – a true multitasking dock. It allows you to watch movies, play music and shows photos in the widescreen format while easily synchronizing and charging simultaneously. Additionally, it displays weather and time and serves as an alarm clock. It comes with its own USB cable. Thus, Motorola Multimedia Desktop Charger turns your Motorola Droid X into a multimedia experience and doubles as a charger!

Supported Features:

• Data Synchronization
• Charge Motorola Droid X while docked
• Play Music
• Watch Movies
• Sits horizontally to display photos and movies

The Motorola desktop dock with Travel Charger is on sale now for $39.95 from the Droid Free Apps store. Grab it today before the deal closes.

Slow and steady wins the race. Google’s Android is winning global platforms, slowly and surely, following similar growth patterns to its US acquisitions. According to IDC, Google Android following its unprecedented triumph over Microsoft’s Window Phone 7 in Europe, is expecting to win out in 2011.

This could be attributed to the fact – Windows Phone 7 has been performed poorly in Europe with its sales target. Android takes the lead by 15:1 margin for market share as compared to 3% share of Windows Phone 7.

IDC also reveals that Android will surpass Nokia’s Symbian that has been losing market share rapidly.

“Nine-month sales of Android devices in Western Europe were led by HTC Corp. with 39 percent of shipments, followed by Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB with 27 percent and Samsung Electronics Co. with 14 percent. Samsung is gaining following the launch of the Galaxy S in the second half,”

Francisco Jeronimo (IDC analyst and expert)

Our Verdict:  Android is growing at a rate of 8% per month, and currently holds 37% of ad impressions. r Android has managed to stand up to the tall image created by last year winner – iPhone, as today people are looking for something different.

Winamp with over 60 million users worldwide is a popular music management software for Windows, which is making a big leap with AOL on the Android platform. Even though 5% users are from US, however, AOL is, hoping to attract plenty of new U.S. mobile users to become the iTunes for Android devices.

Winamp for Android is available as BETA version, after its initial launch and more than 500,000 downloads later. It allows you to manage your music downloads along with wireless syncing over Wi-Fi. The wireless syncing requires a new desktop version for Windows computers, which is also available today.

So what does Winamp allows the user to do?

• Mange and play your digital music collection
• Import non-DRMed music from iTunes
• Create playlists, search by song, artist, or album, and listen to Shoutcast Radio
• Click on an album cover to get listening along with discography information, news, and music reviews from AOL Music
• Effortless transfer of music from desktop to your phone via Wi-Fi

People spend about 80 minutes a day listening to music through their desktop app and Winamp has certainly improved and extended listening opportunities to mobile phone users.  Who knows, it may soon turn out to be a strong distribution partner for other subscription music services.

Originally, we heard that dual-core Motorola Olympus would be available via AT&T by January 2011, but now it appears the phone may be presented earlier in December 2010 – according to a Facebook message (which has been deleted).

Sadly, AT&T, who posted the message, later stated that “we don’t have any information to share about upcoming devices and that the message was posted erroneously,” so we cannot comment further on this leak. But, what we know for sure is: Tegra 2 handset that will feature front facing camera, slimmer profile and display of 4-inches. If the device will ship with vanilla Android? That’s still not clear.

We hope that Motorola would skip the custom UI this time and produce a more elegant option.