Nokia held on through another quarter with no major new devices, but it didn’t come cheap. The Finnish handset maker lost $98.7 million on a 25% year-over-year decline in handset sales and continued losses at NAVTEQ and Nokia Siemens Networks.

Revenues were down 13%, smartphone sales dropped 39% and feature phone sales slid 13%. Nokia sold 106.6 million mobile devices during the quarter, nearly 90 million of which were basic candy bar phones and the like. Indeed, the one bright spot in Nokia’s earnings came from its Symbian-based mobile phones. The company sold 89.9 million mobile devices during the quarter, an 8% jump from the year prior and a 25% increase from the previous quarter.

While losses continue at NAVTEQ and Nokia Siemens Networks, they did move in the right direction. Nokia is widely expected to unveil its first Windows Phone-based smartphones next week at Nokia World in London.

Google Nexus, the next flagship smartphone for Android drops next month. The Samsung device will also serve as the debut for Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android 4.0.

The updated operating system from Google features a refined user experience that mirrors many of the enhancements Google brought to its Honeycomb build for tablets. Ice Cream Sandwich also delivers improved multi-tasking, notifications, NFC support and a new People app that organizes your contacts and the photos and other content you share with them. Read more

Apple fired a rare miss last quarter with slowed growth, declining iPhone sales and a drop in profit. iPhone sales were pointedly down in the second half of the quarter after iOS 5 was announced and speculation of a new iPhone intensified.

As always, Apple is playing the slip off in a typically calm, cool and collected manner. The drop in iPhone sales was less than expected, according to executives, and CEO Tim Cook said he is “confident that (Apple) will set an all-time record for iPhone this quarter.”

iPhone sales were up 21% year-over-year to 17.07 million units, but down from the previous two quarters. Year-over-year iPad sales shot up 166% to a new high of 11.12 million, Mac sales jumped 26% to 4.89 million and iPod sales declined 27% to 6.62 million. Read more

Android is now powering more than 190 million devices. Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page calls the platform’s growth “mind boggling.”

Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in the company’s future, but until last week’s earnings call there was little sense of just how much it contributes to the company’s bottom line.

Mobile is now operating at an annual run rate above $2.5 billion, Page said, adding that revenue tied to the company’s mobile operations has grown two-and-a-half times in the last 12 months. Read more

Apple broke more records over the weekend, selling more than four million of its new iPhone 4S in its first three days on the market. The company also announced that more than 25 million customers are using iOS 5 five days after its release and more than 20 million customers have signed up for its iCloud service.

Apple served up more than 1 million pre-orders for the iPhone 4S in the first 24 hours and went on sell four times that amount over opening weekend.

Sales numbers did not disappoint, despite the issues Apple faced over the weekend as an untold number of users reported errors with the device’s new voice-activated service, Siri. Read more

Millions of BlackBerry users spanning at least four continents are without service for a third consecutive day. An untold number of customers, not all however, are unable to send messages, emails or browse the web in parts of North and South America, Africa, Middle East and Europe.

A little more than an hour ago, Research In Motion admitted that it’s still working to resolve the “service issue that many of our BlackBerry customers are experiencing.”

The early outages occurred Monday in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, but as of this morning they have reached the Americas — and they are ongoing. Read more

iPads generate more mobile traffic than all other iOS devices combined

Mobile devices comprised 6.8% of all online traffic in August 2011. Nearly two-thirds of that traffic came from mobile phones while tablets accounted for the remainder, according to a new report from comScore.

The number of U.S. subscribers consuming mobile media grew 19% in the past year to 116 million people. While the growth is noteworthy, it also highlights the large untapped market for mobile data that still exists. Read more

SAN DIEGO — For the first time ever, there are now more active wireless devices in the United States than there are people. With 327,577,529 active connections at the end of June, the United States currently averages nearly 1.05 devices for each of its 312,403,988 current residents, according to a new survey from CTIA.

Those 327 million subscriber connections generated service revenues of $164.5 billion in the 12-month period ending in June, according to CTIA’s Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey (PDF) of wireless service providers comprising 95.5% of all estimated subscriber connections.

And where’s all that money being spent? Cell sites, for starters. The American landscape was blanketed with 256,920 cell sites at the end of June, marking an annual growth rate of barely 2%. Read more

SAN DIEGO — The heads of the three largest wireless carriers in the country shared the big stage but no news this morning at CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2011. The 90-minute opening keynote session was “full of platitudes” and signified nothing new, Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at Ovum, remarked in a tweet.

Sprint Chairman and CEO Dan Hesse took the role of industry cheerleader as this year’s chairman of the CTIA board, adding: “Those of us in the wireless industry should be thankful that we’re arguably in the most important industry in the world.” Read more

Apple hit a new record last Friday, surpassing 1 million pre-orders for the new iPhone 4S in the first 24 hours. The previous one-day record, held by the iPhone 4, was 600,000 pre-orders.

The iPhone 4S is the first iPhone available at more than one U.S. carrier at launch. Apple has greater reach now with AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. None of the carriers broke down pre-order sales figures, though more details should come after the iPhone 4S is available for purchase (and begins shipping) this Friday.

Following its pre-order run, it appears all but certain that Apple will break all other previously established records with the iPhone 4S at launch and going forward. Volume totals are likely to be shared by Apple and the carriers when each of the companies release their quarterly earnings in the coming weeks. Read more