"This demonstrates that there is still significant potential in the handheld market in EMEA, despite the negative news coming from other worldwide regions," Canalys Director Chris Jones said in a statement. Lesser-known brands have started to make a larger impact than established names such as Toshiba and Dell, Jones added. While the impressive growth in wireless handhelds might tempt manufacturers to jump in, Jones warned companies against entering the market unprepared. Having a good product is only the first step, he said, and building relationships with carriers is the key.

"It is only the operators themselves and crazy plant lady iphone case RIM, which has adopted a very operator-centric channel approach, who have had any kind of success in this segment," Jones said, The study also showed that the Symbian operating system, promoted by a consortium including Nokia, still rules in more than 94 percent of smart phones in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, The share for Microsoft's competing software dropped back to around 4 percent after a relatively good first quarter, while the share for PalmSource, used in PalmOne's Treo 600, notched up to just under 2 percent..

Nokia and HP take top spots as shipments of smart phones, handhelds and other mobile devices shoot up in the second quarter. Roughly 2.58 million mobile devices were shipped in the three months to the end of June, compared with approximately 1.7 million in the same period in 2003, the company said in a report released Tuesday. In the voice-device segment, which includes smart phones, Nokia accounted for around 80 percent of all new handsets shipped in the quarter. That left single-digit crumbs to rival phone makers such as Sony Ericsson and Siemens. The cumulative growth for the voice segment was 57 percent.

CNET también está disponible en español, Don't show this again, Engineers at Nextel, Motorola and SiRF Technologies, which made the GPS chips inside the cell phones, are trying to find the root cause, Company representatives would not speculate on a crazy plant lady iphone case possible reason for the problems and declined to comment further, At least two vendors of software applications using GPS say Motorola i730 phones have experienced problems starting Saturday, In the case of TeleNav, a location and directions provider, the problem fixed itself, But some services offered by family tracking specialist uLocate have been sidelined, according to company co-founder Alan Phillips..

"We're telling our customers to rely on a setting other than Assisted GPS for now" and instead use a default setting that relies on earthbound cell phone base stations, Phillips said. A prevailing theory is that a time reference used in GPS databases reached its maximum preset number Friday, then reset to zero. The Motorola models may not be able to handle the changes. The problem is reminiscent of the Y2K glitch, also known as the millennium bug, which stems from an old programming shortcut that used only two digits to signify years, such as "76" for 1976. If computer systems do not get modified, the year 2000 could be interpreted as the year 1900 and crash the system or cause glitches.