Apple’s 37 million iPhones sold last quarter were good enough to just eke out a win in smartphones sold during the final three months of 2011. Meanwhile, Samsung shipped 36 million units during the same time frame, according to IDC.

But for all of 2011, Samsung actually shipped the most smartphones, to the tune of 94 million units, IDC says. That’s an increase in shipments of 310 percent for the company compared to 2010, when the company shipped just 22.9 million smartphones — a huge growth rate.

Apple was very close behind, with 93.2 million iPhones shipped during 2011, which, at 96 percent for the year, is also impressive growth but nowhere near Samsung’s amazing showing.

If you’ve been following along then it won’t be a surprise that the rest of the smartphone pack failed to keep pace with these two. Nokia was a distant third for the year with 77.3 million smartphones shipped, followed by RIM with 51.1 BlackBerrys shipped, and HTC with 43.5 million units.

The final tally for 2011 worldwide market share finds Samsung with a 19.1 percent share, and Apple with a 19 percent share. Some might say that’s too close to call. Whatever the exact numbers are, the real story is clearly how over the course of 2011 the smartphone market has coalesced around these two companies. I’d say 2012 is going to be a very interesting year in smartphones.

Note: This story originally misattributed the data to The NPD Group. The report is from IDC.

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On Tuesday, Kayak plans to launch a new app for iOS. It’s throwing out its old Kayak HD iPad app and making a universal Kayak app for iPad and iPhone.

We got a preview of the new app and the overall theme of the changes can most easily be summed up with the word “consistency.” For instance, now the navigation is all left-aligned, with the same icons that will be familiar to users of previous versions of the app. All the filters for searches (flight, cars, hotels) are on the left and the results on the right.

The designers in Kayak’s mobile development lab in Concord, Mass. spent a lot of time “nitpicking” and making the design language universal for the brand, said Bill O’Donnell, Kayak’s GM of mobile and chief architect.

“With this new release, we wanted to bring it up to modern iPad app standards and our own modern visual look we have in our iOS applications,” he said in an interview Tuesday. And making the way the app is navigated and making all the functions consistent (the UIs for flight and hotel search were different in the previous app) was a huge priority.

“It’s more consistent than before,” O’Donnell said. “Before, three different pieces of the app were developed by different people at different times.”

They also added in some features that have been on the Kayak website and in the iPhone app to this new universal iOS version, like rental car search and the Kayak Explorer (a favorite of those of us with wanderlust), an expanded trips management feature that allows you to send any reservation confirmation emails to the app, including concerts and restaurant reservations, and an auto form filler optimized for tons of travel sites Kayak works with.

Another major lesson learned is the implementation of direct booking of hotels. There’s a big impediment to being a an aggregator of travel deals when you’re working with mobile users: When you direct those customers to outside airline or hotel websites, you never know what exactly you’re sending them into.

“In mobile, you can get wildly varied experiences across airlines and hotel sites,” said O’Donnell. Some are Flash-based, some are just terrible quality. “And that’s a problem for us; we make money through referral fees. If you find something in our app and you can’t book it…we lose.”

Kayak introduced direct bookings for some hotels and flights a few months ago, but this is the first time it’s coming to the iPad app.

So what has the iPad team been doing these past two years? Since the 2010 iPad launch, Kayak has had a lot to figure out about the space — as in what users want, and what other developers are doing that’s cool and innovative — and learning to evolve with the maker of the iPad and arbiter of iOS app taste and style, Apple itself. “We had to learn all that. There’s no way around that except time and experience,” O’Donnell said.

It was also a challenge to figure out the difference between designing for a tiny iPhone screen, a much larger computer browser and an iPad screen. It takes far more time to design well for the iPad, according to O’Donnell.

“When you’re dealing with an app on an iPhone or an iPad, your application is the only thing on the screen. The big thing you control is edge to edge and top to bottotm; there’s nothing else to distract the user. To some extent, you can get away with a plain or sparse or austere website, because it’s framed in a Safari window or a nice Mac desktop or Windows desktop,” he said. But, “when you’re the only thing on the screen, that can look really bad. You have to pay attention to use of white space, lines, separation of colors and spend more design time on it.”

There’s also something in here for users of Kayak’s iOS apps to learn: The new app, as mentioned before, is universal. So if you have the old iPad HD app, that one’s dead now and won’t be updated again. The new iOS app, which is still free, will have to be downloaded anew. It will detect if you’re downloading it on an iPhone or an iPad. It should be in the App Store later today.

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Good’s survey includes responses from 400 of Good’s largest customers, with 2,000 employees or more, in October. And according to the results BYOD is being very clearly embraced: 70 percent of respondents said they currently let employees bring their own smartphone (or tablet) to work, 19 percent are considering allowing it, and just 9 percent said they had no plans for BYOD programs.

Being a large company isn’t a deterrent: among those polled, 80 percent that allow BYOD have 2,000 employees or more, 60 percent have 5,000 or more and 35 percent have 10,000 or more. And of those companies, half allow employees to bring their own smartphone or tablet to work as long as they pay for all the costs, while 45 percent offer some kind of stipend for employees to use toward buying a device or a way to expense monthly costs.

BYOD is not as popular among retailers and government agencies, according the the study. But the reason that it’s finding so much success at highly regulated industries, like healthcare and finance — which have very high bars for security and compliance — is the existence of software available that allays those concerns. (Like Good’s, hence their survey.) New mobile software can be installed on personal iPhones or Android phones that “create strong separation between business data and what’s happening on the personal side of the device,” John Herrema, SVP of Corporate Strategy at Good, said in an interview. That separation helps hospitals, banks and other meet compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI data security and more.

As far as what kinds of devices these workers are bringing in when given the choice, it’s not a huge shock: “Overall, our customers are absolutely activating iOS and Android to the exclusion of everything else we support,” said Herrema. “Historically, we’ve supported Windows Mobile, Symbian, some are even on old Treo devices. Bu these days it’s all about iOS and Android all night.”

The exact breakdown among smartphones brought to work (among Good’s customers) is: 60 percent are iPhones, and 40 percent Android. In tablets, it’s not that close: 95 percent of tablets brought to work are iPads, just 5 percent are Android-powered.

For those companies or IT managers hesitant about the practice, consider this: BYOD can help you save money. It’s fairly obvious that by having employees buy their own smartphone instead of issuing them a BlackBerry you’re going to see savings in your IT budget. But even those companies giving a stipend are seeing the financial benefit.

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In a statement, the company said:

We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.

Sprint has admitted to receiving data from CarrierIQ’s software, but it denies using it to track its customers, as has AT&T, which says it uses the information for network management. Verizon, on the other hand, has denied using the software, as has Google on any of the Android phones it makes.

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Android ruled the roost again with 56 percent of the connected device and smartphone OS mix; Apple came in second with 28 percent for iOS; and BlackBerry had the next-most-significant chunk of share with 13 percent. All of these were exactly the same during Millenial’s third-quarter Mobile Mix report, covering July through September. That could be good news for Apple, which is still riding high atop the device pile, taking the top spot for ad impressions among all manufacturers, with 23.5 percent of impressions among the top 15 device manufacturers and 12.53 percent of the top single-device impressions going to the iPhone.

Apple’s share grew slightly compared to the third-quarter results, but Samsung and HTC also experienced a lot of growth, with HTC actually passing Samsung for the second spot among manufacturers of devices. As Kevin has noted previously, China’s Huawei has also been creeping up the charts. But the battle for second appears to be one that mostly affects the distribution of Android sales; IOS, as per its relatively stable market share, doesn’t appear to be all that affected by power struggles among the Android hardware maker ranks, at least during the past few months.

Apple also continues to take in an outsize portion of mobile advertising spending compared with Android, grabbing 40 percent of application advertising dollars versus 50 percent for Android devices. Apple’s position slid one percentage point between last quarter and October, while Android’s rose one point. Interestingly, during the month of October, gaming applications slid from a long-held first-place position among the categories of apps that get the most ad impressions, replaced by music and entertainment apps, which were in second place last quarter.

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IPass’s Mobile WorkForce Report, released Wednesday, gets its data from a survey of more than 2,300 mobile enterprise workers at 1,100 companies between the end of September and the end of October. We know many of the world’s richest companies are on the iPhone bandwagon already; Apple said last month that “90 percent of Fortune 500 companies” are deploying iPhones for their workers. But iPass’s report gives a bit of a broader picture of  differently sized companies that have iPhones on their network.

IPhones’ popularity for mobile workers isn’t just a result of taking market share from RIM. The overall market is expanding too. From the report:

Today 95 percent of mobile employees have smartphones, up from 85 percent in 2010, with 91 percent using their smartphone for work — a 26 percent rise compared to 2010.

At our Mobilize conference in September, a panel of mobile IT execs declared 2011 the year smartphones cemented their place in the enterprise. “2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, said at the time. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

Tablets, according to iPass, are on the rise, but have a ways to go to be at the smartphone level of penetration in the enterprise, with 44 percent of those surveyed using an iPad at work, compared to 33 percent in the second quarter of this year.

The reason mobile devices are surging in adoption among enterprise workers isn’t necessarily because IT budgets are expanding. According to iPass:

This is due in part to the adoption of “bring your own device” policies by enterprises. Currently 42 percent of mobile employees use individually-liable smartphones for work, up from 34 percent last year.

BYO smartphone policies have grown rapidly in the last year thanks to IT departments being faced with people wanting to use their own iPhone or Android phone from home for work, something RIM never figured out. “RIM never got people to want to pay for the device themselves,” Julie Palen, SVP of enterprise telecom expense management company Tangoe, said in September. “That’s what Apple brought. And Android and Google followed.”

To learn more about the needs of the mobile work force, be sure to attend our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

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McKinsey came up with this data during a recent survey of 15,000 consumers in 15 countries, undertaken to create a profile of what the firm calls the “iConsumer.” Bertil Chappuis, principal for McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office, presented his findings on Tuesday morning at Forbes’ Techonomy conference  in Tuscon, Ariz.

Apple has sold about 40 million iPads since 2010. Of the iPad owners McKinsey surveyed, it found that 62 percent never take their iPad outside their house. In other words, it’s being used as just another home computer, like a replacement laptop for tasks such as watching video or browsing the web. While the iPad is “finding its way into places in the home we didn’t have computing in the past,” the living room is where people use their iPad: 70 percent of usage takes place there.

Said Chappuis:

“The PC tried to get into the living room for 20 years. Well, it’s here.”

The side effect of iPad owners finding their iPad good enough for certain computing tasks at home is a delay in plans to buy a new PC. You can see that in the slowly declining PC sales over the last few quarters: By the end of this year, IDC expects worldwide PC shipments will have grown a measly 2.8 percent compared to 2010.

“Folks who have tablets are significantly delaying their purchases of PCs,” said Chappuis. “They’re not doing away with it — [the PC] has a role to play for a long time — but that delay of a purchase is having a very direct impact on unit volumes in the PC ecosystem.”

To watch the full presentation, see the clip below:

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Of course, the outage was annoying and inconvenient, and hopefully Apple learned a valuable lesson about managing a large-scale, persistent data service managed from its own server facility, and this will never happen again. But the extent of the outcry as the outage wore on, as well as the attempts on Friday to follow up and try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, show that Siri’s effect on the mobile landscape is not insignificant.

It could be the case that Apple’s servers couldn’t handle the demand that Siri was putting on the system, as some users who contacted Apple support about the problem were told. That would indicate that Apple underestimated the scale of demand for Siri, which suggests the personal assistant is being used a lot. But even if the problem is independent of demand, the fact that the news of Siri’s going down spread as far and as quickly as it did, and elicited so much response from the user community, indicates that it is finding a place in people’s lives. Some of the media attention could be attributed to the fact that people love when a winner like Apple stumbles, but user concern seems genuine.

When Apple first announced the personal assistant software, I admit to thinking that Siri had limited value beyond triggering an initial feeling of novelty that would fade quickly. After using Siri myself, I found that it actually had a lot of real use value, even in countries where it hasn’t yet gained localization features. The indignation of users affected by the outage indicates that I wasn’t the only one who found myself leaning on Siri a lot more heavily than I expected to.

It’s not as widespread, but the outcry about Siri’s downtime reminds me of the web-wide groans that go up every time the Twitter fail whale makes one of its visits or when Tumblr takes a tumble. That’s a minor PR problem for Apple in the short term, but in the larger picture, it’s a very good thing that people miss Siri when she’s not around.

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Here’s a quick summary of what’s new:

• Typing indicators let you know when someone’s replying. This is something a lot of similar apps and services have, including iMessage which is built in to iOS 5. It can come in handy by preventing you from saying more than you need to.
• Users that are online are now listed, as well as those who are reachable via mobile app. That should help you know if you should be expecting an immediate reply or not. People you talk to most frequently are also now displayed at the top of your contact list, just like they are in the web interface.

The update is small, but does make changes where it matters most, making Messenger more useful for actually communicating with your Facebook contacts. There’s also now a version available for BlackBerry, which means all the major smartphone platforms can now join the conversation. The update is available now in the App Store.

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Taking photos

You’ll encounter the biggest change when you go to take a photo. You can now use your volume up button to take a photo, making it a more natural and steady experience. You can also put an overlay grid on the screen to make sure your photo is straight (yes, I know, my sample isn’t straight).

With iOS 5, you can now access the camera app directly from the lock screen. This is a fantastic time-saver. Previously, in the couple of seconds it took to unlock the iPhone and launch the Camera app, the moment had often passed. Now, I’ve dramatically increased the number of photos of my cat that actually come out well.

Editing photos

All edits take place in the Photos app. To edit a photo, choose it from the Camera Roll, and press Edit in the upper right-hand corner. The rudimentary editing tools (rotate, auto enhance, red-eye, and crop) will appear on the bottom.

Rotating photos is a little weird. The tool on the far left will rotate the photo in 90-degree increments. However, if you want to rotate the image any other degree, you need to go into the Crop tool and rotate it using a two-finger twist. To me, it seems like all the rotate tools should be in one area.

Most of the pictures you’re likely to take with your iPhone are in sub-optimal conditions. A bar, outside in direct sunlight, outside at night, etc. Auto enhance is iOS’s best guess as to what the photo should look like if the conditions were better. In my limited tests, it works well enough, though it’s not nearly as good as using a tool like Aperture, but for something you want to quickly enhance before you post it on Twitter, it’s fine.

Left is before auto enhance; right is after

Final thoughts

I’m happy with the Camera and Photos enhancements. While I don’t tend to post many photos on Facebook or Twitter, now that Twitter is integrated into OS, I might start using it more. Giving a photo a quick edit or auto enhance before I post will be nice. The ability to access the camera from the lock screen and using the volume button to capture images are the most significant changes, and should please any mobile photog.

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Camera. The best part of the new Camera app is you can access it right from the lock screen. A close second is the ability to use the top volume button as a shutter. These should help you take quicker and better pictures. Not having to unlock your phone and tap the Camera could be the difference to taking a funny picture of your kid, or taking a picture of where your kid used to be. Using the volume button should reduce camera shake from haphazardly stabbing the on-screen button to capture an image.

You can also show a grid while taking your photo to help you take a straight image, and lock in the exposure and focus. I’m really looking forward to the exposure lock to take photos like this on my iPhone. My iPhone isn’t my best camera, but it’s the camera I always have with me, and I’m looking forward to these improvements.

Cards. I found Cards to be a curious lead-off for the iOS portion, as well as a head-scratcher for its inclusion at all. Cards is a free download, has 21 different designs for letterpress cards, and it will cost you $2.99 to have them mailed in the U.S. or $4.99 anywhere else. While I’m cynical about this service’s chances at success, I think it’s a great way to easily send travel postcards with a custom note right from your iPhone, especially when paired with the new Camera app.

Find my Friends. My first reaction to Find My Friends was a sarcastic, “So, now you can tell if your husband really is where he says he is.” The reality is, I could have used this feature a couple of weeks ago. A contractor was having trouble finding my house and I couldn’t help him based on his description of his surroundings. If we both had iPhones and Find My Friends, it would have really helped out. Apple has given Disneyland as place where it could come in handy, and that’s a good example. Apple also seems to have kept privacy in mind by allowing you to go off the grid and decide whom you will share your location with using simple touch-based controls.

All three of these apps will be available Oct. 12 when iOS 5 and iCloud launch.

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T-Mobile USA Chief Marketing Officer Cole Brodman, talking with Om Malik about the iPhone, said, “We’d love to have the iPhone whenever Apple makes that available.” He also said, “the ball is in Apple’s court” and his company is “waiting for that phone call.”

Translation: No, T-Mobile is not going to be carrying the next iPhone, which is likely to be announced in a few weeks.

Compare that to what Sprint said. Stacey Higginbotham asked Stephen Bye, Sprint’s CTO, the same question. His response? “I’m not in a position to comment on that.”

That’s definitely not a “no.” He’s certainly in a position to know the answer, so his choice to go with a “no comment” is either meant to keep up the mystery, or avoid getting into trouble with Apple before the big reveal. It’s also very similar to what Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse did last week at another conference, when he refused to deny reports that his company would be offering the iPhone very soon.

Couldn’t make it to Mobilize 2011? Watch the live stream and follow our live blogging of the event as it unfolds.

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There is still no deal for the carrier to offer the iPhone, Wang Jianzhou told the Wall Street Journal. But the two are talking about 4G.

Bloomberg reports:

“China Mobile and Apple hope to find a solution for close collaboration” on the TD-LTE network and compatible products, Wang said in an interview in Dalian today. “We discussed this issue with Apple. We hope Apple will produce a new iPhone with TD-LTE. We have already got a positive answer from Apple.”

To be clear, TD-LTE is not the same LTE (subscription required) that AT&T and Verizon are deploying here in the U.S. The technology is slightly different, and it will require a device maker to put a separate radio inside the phone to work on the TD-LTE network deployed by China Mobile and a few other carriers, including Clearwire in the U.S. If Sprint were to go along with Clearwire’s TD-LTE plans, then the deal with China Mobile might lead to a 4G iPhone for Sprint too.

China Mobile wants the iPhone to add more subscribers and keep pace with competitor China Unicom, which does offer Apple’s smartphone.

Apple has been focusing its efforts on the Chinese market — with success so far. In its most recent quarter, Apple said it racked up more sales in the country than hometown favorite Lenovo had during the same time period.

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Tour of the history of the Brooklyn Bridge

Smartphone-toting history geeks like myself have probably noticed that apps for uploading geo-tagged historical photos to a map is a popular idea right now. History Pin, the Google-backed non-profit, and What Was There both launched recently with similar ideas: Use the ubiquity of mobile devices to teach people about how the world around them looked in the past. Think of Rama as that, but with a curated historical narrative, and a revenue-making model.

As cool as some of us might find seeing pictures on our smartphone of, say, what San Francisco City Hall looked like right after the 1906 earthquake when we’re standing right in front of the gleaming building in the city’s Civic Center, Michael Carroll decided it was much more useful to also explain all the related historical events and context of why, for instance, some buildings were damaged more than others, and why a massive fire broke out.

So he went and built an app (that’s free in the iOS App Store) that has historical background info and photos on an interactive mobile map. They’re divided into tours (starting at 99 cents) that can be submitted by anyone, but fact-checked and edited by Rama.

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There are several iPhone apps that allow users to ask questions of random people checked in to various locations. That includes location-based question apps like Locqly, Crowdbeacon and Social Questions (mobile app for Quora), but those aren’t focused on real-time answers. Loopt, a location-based check-in app like Foursquare and Gowalla, now has a questions feature for several cities, but those questions (at least initially) were posed by the company’s own community managers.

Localmind is an iPhone app that launched at SXSW Interactive this year and has about 30,000 users right now. (There is also an Android version that launched earlier this month.) I talked with Localmind Co-Founder and CEO Lenny Rachitsky recently about how those users have recently begun using his app during major recent disasters.

It was almost like “a reverse Twitter,” as Rachitsky put it. Through Localmind, you’d basically be prompting people for their status updates, instead of the other way around.

It started during the London riots, when he noticed questions coming through their system asking about the status of a few locations during the week of mayhem that engulfed the city. But questions about the relative safety or status of locations popped up again during last week’s quake that rattled the East Coast, and even more so over the weekend as Hurricane Irene barreled up the eastern seaboard of the U.S.

Over the weekend, the questions asked of people checked into locations from North Carolina up to New York City about Irene ranged from the firmly tongue-in-cheek (To a user in Richmond, Va.: “Is it wet at Hurricane Irene?”) to the practical (“What’s the closest public transportation in your area?” to someone in Manhattan) to the merely curious (User from Ohio to someone in Virginia Beach, Va.: “What’s it like in the shadow of Irene?”).

The respective answers, if you’re curious, were “Wet, yes, but not as flooded as Gaston!,” “Nothing is operating public transportation-wise because of Hurricane Irene” and “The storm lasted all night. My house is on the water, and water rose 5′ above the high tide. Lots of trees down.”

Now this was not the only way to find out news during the storm from people on the ground. Plenty of people used Twitter during the hurricane, but if you were watching from afar, as I was in San Francisco, you could either wait for tweets that had an Irene-related hashtag to roll in or ask questions of people who are on Twitter. There’s no guarantee of an answer, especially if the person is, say, taping up their windows or clearing their driveway of fallen tree limbs.

There’s no guarantee on Localmind either that you’ll get a response, but the pop-up notifications it uses does prompt users checked in somewhere to answer. And in this case, answers came in relatively fast, which is key for a real-time Q&A service. This past weekend, Rachitsky said Localmind saw a 25-percent increase in questions answered “within 10 minutes,” and a 25-percent increase in questions being asked of users checked in to East Coast locations.

While this might in hindsight seem a natural way of using the app, it’s not exactly how the guys behind Localmind conceived of the service. “This use case came out of nowhere for us, as we thought we were building a very local location-based app,” said Rachitsky, who is one of three employees of the Canada San Francisco-based startup. “We realized it’s very compelling to be able to zoom out on the map, find a marker in say Japan or Australia, and send a question that goes to some random person in Japan/Australia/etc.” Or North Carolina, New York, or London.

And they’re clearly please with this development.

Said Rachitsky, “It’s not a primary use case, but we’re happy to support it.”

Be sure to join us at Mobilize 2011 next month where Localmind will be one of 10 startups in the LaunchPad competition. Also at Mobilize you’ll learn about other ways we’ll be using mobile, social, and location-based based apps in the future, the secrets of high-engagement apps and more.

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Besides the convenience of fewer books and pieces of paper floating around, United says the cost and efficiency of flying will be affected for the better too. The normal 38 pounds of paper flight manuals, charts, reference handbooks, checklists, log books and weather info will be bumped in favor of a 1.5-pound iPad, which should severely lighten pilots’ load. All told that’s 12,000 sheets of paper per pilot that United will no longer be ordering, the airline says.

As a result, United says it will reduce fuel consumption too:

The airline projects EFBs will save nearly 16 million sheets of paper a year which is equivalent to more than 1,900 trees not cut down. Saving 326,000 gallons of jet fuel a year reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 3,208 metric tons.

So with all that extra weight reduced and fuel saved, does that mean it will start charging less for passenger baggage fees? That’s probably wishful thinking.

We’ll be talking a lot more about how the iPad and other tablets are changing the enterprise at our Mobilize event in San Francisco next month.

Image courtesy of Flickr user adpowers

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