It’s no secret that Nokia’s failure to compete in the smartphone arena is hurting its business, and it shows in the company’s Q2 financial results.

Apple’s Smartphone Antenna Performance page, which aims to show that other phones besides iPhone 4 suffer from signal loss when held in a certain way, originally didn’t mention Nokia . However, that didn’t stop Nokia from issuing a statement, claiming that antenna performance has always been a high priority for them.

Apple claimed at its press conference Friday that virtually every competing smartphone faces the same antenna challenges as the iPhone 4 , but three of its competitors — HTC , RIM and Nokia — have since stood up and challenged that claim. Apple used as an example the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700, saying that holding it a certain way will cause signal degradation just as with the iPhone 4, but RIM’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were quoted by CrackBerry from the following statement: Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable

Your profile photo is an important part of your online personality, offering a glimpse of you to the wider world. We’ve previously brought you tips for creating the perfect profile pic , and in this post we’ll be looking at some great online services that can help you create a variety of fun, vintage-looking pics for your profile. So, for anyone who doesn’t have photo editing know-how, expensive editing software and a load of time to spare, here’s how to create a retro profile pic in a matter of minutes using some absolutely free, entirely online services.

Nokia has taken Apple to task for comments made by Steve Jobs about how users experiencing reception problems on their new iPhone 4 devices should “ avoid holding it that way ” (“that way” meaning a grip that blocks the antenna).

Nokia has taken Apple to task for comments made by Steve Jobs about how users experiencing reception problems on their new iPhone 4 devices should “ avoid holding it that way ” (“that way” meaning a grip that blocks the antenna). The maker of Symbian-based smartphones authored a post on its blog called “How do you hold your Nokia?” –- featuring step-by-step instructions on a variety of grips such as “the cup,” “the balance” and “the four edge grip.” The company goes on to note, “One of the main things we’ve found about the one billion plus Nokia devices that are in use today is that when making a phone call, people generally tend to hold their phone like a…. well, like a phone.” Obviously, this is all a jab at the iPhone (though Apple is never specifically mentioned) and its supposed reception issues, as Nokia concludes its post by writing: “Of course, feel free to ignore all of the above because realistically, you’re free to hold your Nokia device any way you like

We already know that Nokia has plans to switch from Symbian to Linux on its flagship smartphones, and now it’s official: Nokia N8 will be the last N-series phone based on the Symbian OS. From now on, Nokia’s N-series smartphones will be based on MeeGo, a mobile platform which is the love child of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin, both based on Linux. Symbian won’t go away completely — it will power some of Nokia’s mid and low-range smartphones — but for its most powerful smartphones, it’s all MeeGo from now on.

Quantcast released its North American mobile OS market share report for May 2010 today and the results are indicative of a trend we have seen from other sources : The iPhone is still the market leader, but Android is making big gains.

Mobile advertising network AdMob has released its mobile metrics report for April 2010 , which takes a closer look at the geographic distribution of unique iPhone and Android devices.

Today at Google I/O , Google officially announced the forthcoming release of an open source, royalty-free video format called WebM .