According to Gartner’s third quarter smartphone data, Android has a 25.5% slice of worldwide smartphone sales, helping it achieve the second place as an operating system, right behind Symbian. Apple’s iOS dropped a bit compared to last year, with 16.6% this time.

Symbian is still at the top spot this year at 36.6%, but their position is being threatened. Global mobile phone sales totaled 417 million units in the third quarter of 2010, a 35 percent increase from the third quarter of 2009.

Amazon still has a comfortable lead over Apple and other competitors in the US e-book market, according to an analysis by RR Bowker. The group claims that Amazon’s Kindle Store controlled 61 percent of e-book downloads.

Barnes & Noble’s store has 20 percent while Sony has five percent. Apple’s market share for the iBookstore wasn’t published at the time of the study, but was less than five percent. Amazon also has the largest device market share, at 40 percent, and reading directly on a computer comes in second.

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, what with all of the browsers available. For the first time ever Microsoft’s Internet Explorer accounts for less than 60% of the browser market. At one point it dominated with 95% of the market in 2003. NetApplications, who published the figure, has IE at 59.9%, Firefox with 24.5% and Google’s Chrome with a 6.7% share (up from 1.7% last year). Safari wasn’t listed.

Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann, said, “There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple’s Safari. There is just a great awareness that there are alternatives,” And it might just be that MS is losing loyal users as well.

Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha has confirmed that the cell phone company is very interested in the tablet arena, causing some speculation that Motorola would be interested in coming up with its own tablet computer. What would a Motorola tablet be like? We have no idea, but we’d like to see where they take the idea.

Sure, Motorola is keeping an eye on the tablet industry, but there just isn’t anything concrete that suggests that they are serious about making their own tablet device right now, however we can easily see them entering the fray in a year or two.

The Android Market still may not have the sheer volume of apps that Apple enjoys, but they are quietly catching up. In March alone, over 9,000 applications were added. Of course, with more apps come more junk and redundancy, but that is to be expected. That might be a problem as it grows.

But for now, this is impressive growth and it looks like things are only getting better. The android market went from a 5,532 app increase in February to a 9,330 increase in March. Right now there are over 27,000 apps in the Android Market.

NEC has a pair of spiffy new LCD displays available in the U.S. today to match a recent release of similar models in Japan. The LCD2490WUXi2 and the LCD2490W2 both feature 24-inch screens and IPS panels. These displays offer a much better image quality than TV or PVA screens and allows them to show 96.7% of the sRGB color space.

Professional graphics editors and photographers are going to love these models. Some other features include auto-brightness, 12-bit color lookup tables, ambient light sensors a 320cd/m2 brightness, a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, VGA and DVI inputs.