Regardless of whether you are a fan of the Apple iPhone or not, it is very difficult to argue with the freight train momentum and success that the mobile smartphone has achieved in the last five years. Judging by the statistics that surround the sales of the phone, and the record breaking financial results posted by Apple for the end of 2011, it seems that the popularity of the iPhone is set to rise and rise with every release.

For any consumer who may be taking the time to consider purchasing a new mobile phone, or a tablet computer, they will more than likely begin by considering either an Apple iPhone or iPad as their purchase of choice. With over a quarter of a billion iOS devices sold around the world, the iPhone and iPad are insanely popular, and considered by many to be the leading products in the mobile computing sector.

Whilst iOS and Android dominate much of the mobile software headlines, Microsoft has been steadily building a stable legion of support from consumers and developers alike.

While there is no news of Instagram for Windows Phone 7*, an independent developer has released an alternative app of sorts called InstaCam. Details after the jump!

Video games are a big business, and the mobile video game industry is growing at an alarming rate. You just need to look at the iPhone App Store’s top fifty applications to see just how popular games on mobile devices are, and again, they are growing faster than we actually hoped for. It is no wondering that developers are starting to invest a lot of time and money into producing highly polished and professional looking mobile games which in some instances even feature professionally recorded soundtracks.

Microsoft and its Windows Phone 7 have a big year ahead of themselves. Google and Apple currently have the mobile space all-but sewn up, and even old stalwarts like BlackBerry are struggling to compete with the new hotness that is iOS and Android.

With so many different takes on the archetypal smartphone from various manufacturers, it’s often difficult to surmise the size of your next smartphone unless, like choosing a dog from the rescue home, you pay it a visit to Target in advance. Please, don’t take that as a cue to go and create a comparison website though, since we already have far too many of those, and in most cases, they don’t offer anything we don’t already know. Well, that was until the rather striking offering of phone-size.com. Much more than a simply mind-numbing table of specs allied to a pixelated image, phone-size lets you compare the size of your phone, versus the size of someone else’s. Interested? More after the jump!

With the world’s love of photography and photo sharing, it is hardly surprising that some of the most popular mobile applications reside in the photo and video category of the various app stores and marketplaces. One of the most well known, and the most popular one is Instagram, which is a free of charge photo sharing application.

So here we are, day three of my look into what the biggest players in the smartphone world will, or possibly should do in 2012.

Nokia is going big with the whole Windows Phone thing, which is probably something to do with that infamous deal it struck with Microsoft last year. As part of the Finnish firm’s newfound love for all things Windows Phone, Nokia has now announced its first WP7 handset to be made available in the United States.

The video sharing website, Vimeo, recently turned seven years old, and although in some peoples eyes it may sit in the shadow of Google’s YouTube, its rise to importance on the world wide web has been dramatic. The website was founded in late 2004 by two partners and was intended to be a place solely for the uploading of user made videos. The name ‘Vimeo’ is said to reflect this with it being a combination of the words ‘video’ and ‘me’.

We’re fast approaching that time of year again. The time of year when tech journalists and anyone else mad enough descends upon the Sin City in order to get their hands on the latest and greatest gadgets the world of tech has to offer.

What happens when you put three of the latest smartphones, a video camera, a WiFi connection and a smartphone enthusiast in one room? You get a video comparison. In today’s video comparison, we get to compare and contrast the browser performance of the iPhone 4, Lumia 800 and the iPhone 4S. Details and video available after the jump!

Unlocking Windows-based smartphones has never been that much of a palava when compared to the increasingly limited methods available for those using Apple’s iPhone, for example.

Microsoft is on something of an app releasing bender of late. If they aren’t releasing new iPhone and Android apps or games, then they are bringing new apps to their own also-ran mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft has released a fun (and free!) application that promises a few laughs. Face Swap is available for Windows Phone users and with a few simple steps, allows you to swap faces between two people. It may work with more than two, but I have not tested it. The application can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

A new report published by Nielsen offers a lot of insight into smartphone usage in the US. Some of the findings are particularly interesting because of how users trends are separated by age group. For example, the majority of 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 year olds now own smartphones: 53% and 64% respectively. We’ll cover the rest of the findings one by one.

Nokia plans on creating a limited number of handsets inspired by the newer Batman franchise. The Lumia 800 will feature a laser-etched Batman logo on the back of the device.

If you combine the entire Apple and Android OS phones out there, how much market share would they take? According to the research firm, The NDP Group, that number is 82%. That’s quite a bit of the pie.

Things just got very interesting in the world of cloud storage, especially if you own an iPhone. Microsoft has today released a new ‘SkyDrive’ app for both Windows Phone and iPhone, bringing iCloud and Dropbox-like file management and syncing to Microsoft’s own mobile operating system as well as Apple’s hugely successful iOS.