Two tablets are currently fighting for leadership in the holiday season: Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad.

The vast majority of smartphone users in the US – 71% – own either an Android device or an iPhone. If we talk about apps, the superiority is even greater: 83% of those who downloaded apps in the last 30 days use either iPhone or Android.

Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is now the fifth largest app store. It is outstripped only by the Apple App Store, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store and BlackBerry App World.

43% of all smartphones sold in the UK in October were iPhones, according to research by Kantar Worldplanet. For comparison, Android phones took only 35% of sales. However, the total number of Android devices in England is still ahead of the iPhone.

In preparation for the release of the new version of BlackBerry, RIM is trying to lure Android developers to its side. Despite the general belief that the battle in the field of mobile devices has narrowed down to the struggle between iOS and Android only, RIM emphasizes at every step that the BlackBerry platform is not dead.

According to a study by the consulting company GfK, Apple has seriously overtaken its competitors in terms of user loyalty to the brand. Approximately 84% of iPhone owners said they would purchase an Apple smartphone again.

According to Kirill Petrov, Managing Director of i-Free, in 2011 Russian developers creating applications for iOS and Android platforms will receive more than $ 80 million. Most of this money will be earned outside of Russia, one of the main reasons is that payment by bank cards is still poorly developed in our country.

Android’s share of the tablet market is expected to grow in the next two years. According to a recent study by eMarketer, at the moment the share of the iPad is 83%, but Android and Windows 8 will reduce its share to 76% next year, to 71% in 2013 and to 68% by 2014.

In this issue: iOS apps bring 90% of profits, Europe is the leader in the number of Android apps downloaded per person, Apple has started accepting Chinese yuan in the App Store.

According to the latest research by Zscaler, the share of Android from the total number of transactions of the three leading mobile platforms was 40%. This is a big breakthrough compared to the second quarter, in which the Google platform owned only 17% of transactions.

The Bloomberg resource reports that Apple has removed the Big Fish Games application, with which it was possible to subscribe to the developer and receive games for a monthly fee.

Apple is launching a model for selling iPad games by monthly subscription. The first publisher to try it out will be the American company Big Fish Games.

Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad tops the top non-Apple tablets sold from January to October 2011.  He now owns 17% of the market, according to NPD Group. Samsung is in second place with 16% of the market.

According to the estimates of the analytical company Piper Jaffray, 90% of all money spent on applications for mobile devices is accounted for by Apple’s iOS; the Android Market has earned only 7% of the money collected in the App Store over the entire period of its existence. This directly affects the income of developers.

Mobile VAS Conference, the largest international forum dedicated to the development of the market of additional mobile services, will be held in St. Petersburg this week.

The British company Blaze Interactive has announced the upcoming release of a new device called GameGadget. The Linux-based device will support games for different platforms and will allow developers to make money on “retro games”.

According to research2guidity, in the third quarter of 2011, more than half a million applications were added to the Android Market, however, as a result, only 319,161 remained available, while more than 600,000 applications were added to the App Store, of which 459,589 remained. The difference in quantity is decreasing more and more.

The US mobile market is the leading one in terms of the total volume of downloaded Android applications, however, Europe was in first place in terms of the number of downloaded applications per user.