Steve Jobs would have fit this ad perfectly, but I’m guessing he wouldn’t have liked to have his image used for a retail chain. Last year Best Buy had an ad that involved Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber and thank God we got rid of that commercial. Originally, this year was also supposed to involve a celebrity in the Super Bowl campaign, but Drew Panayiotou, Best Buy US marketing chief was influenced by Steve Jobs’ passing and decided to go with innovators, considering the Silicon Valley inventors are modern stars.

The ad below opens with Philippe Kahn, the CEO of Fullpower Technologies and the guy we give credit for inventing the cameraphone. Next, there’s Ray Kurzweil, the father of text to speech tech and we also see guys from Square, Shazam and Words With Friends. In spite of this original ad, Best Buy has had a rough year, being seen as a sinking ship by many, as it competes with Walmart and other strong rivals.

Krusell covers 70 countries all over the globe and sells its products on 6 continents. The iPhone 4S reigns on top of the list for November sales, after being number 2 a month before. Next up, on second place is the Samsung Galaxy S II, seen by many as the phone of the year and third is the surprising addition of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S, an updated Arc that might soon become the most beloved single core smartphone with Android.

Fourth is Samsung Galaxy s, that’s still selling very well and then the Xperia Ray, that I personally love and consider a great phone. It’s compact, cheap and has great specs. The Nokia 3720 Classic is on sixth place, while the Xperia Neo gives us some physical QWERTY love on seventh spot. HTC Sensation, another hit of 2011 makes 8th place, followed by Samsung B2100 and HTC Titan, brining the tiles to this top 10.

These models could be aimed at first time buyers, that maybe haven’t heard of Nokia till now. In case this is the real strategy in the USA, it would be a real contradiction with the focus on high end models with Windows Phone that Nokia promoted lately. Weber also said at Nokia World that Android is a bit too complicated for the first time smartphone user and the new buyer would need to download about 6 apps to reach the functionality of a Windows Phone unit.

The commitment to the US market was also mentioned by the same official, although over the past years sales haven’t been great. Windows Phone seems the likely way to conquer the American public, but if it takes entry level Asha devices to do that, so be it… We’ll have to wait and see. Verizon seems the most likely partners for the Finns, in the meantime.

Paying a penny for these units is a real bargain, but it does tie you to Verizon for 2 years and most likely with a pretty big contract to pay each month. This Amazon scheme involves a free two day shipping and it only lasts twill October 17, so hurry and get it! Among the coolest models I’ve seen in the lineup there’s the HTC Thunderbolt 4G, HTC Rhyme, Moto Droid 3. Xperia Play, HTC Trophy, LG Revolution 4G and much, much more.

Both the carrier and the retailer might have struck pure gold with this idea, but too bad it doesn’t last that long… And now let’s wait for Black Friday and the Thanksgiving + Xmas offers!

Meanwhile, Symbian has lost an impressive 16.2% of the market share, mostly because of the antique UI and lack of new models. Luckily Symbian Belle is shaping up to be an interesting OS, although it doesn’t quite matter with nowadays’ evolution of handset OSes. Meanwhile, while Symbian stays on the first place in Europe with 37.8% of the market, Android fllows with 22.3% and then iOS with 20.3% and I’m talking only smartphones here.

Next up is RIM with 9.4% and finally Microsoft, losing market share from last year, no less than 4.8% that brought it to 6.7% now. The table below shows the public’s preference for a certain brand of the Android world, meaning that they’re really into HTC, followed by Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola. HTC gets a 34.6% share, while Samsung is close behind with 31.7%. Do you agree with these figures and really favour HTC?

The iPhone gets a score of 838, on second place being HTC with 801 and both Apple and the Taiwanese maker are above the industry standard of 788 points. Samsung is barely placed on third place with a score of 777, but maybe it would be higher if the Samsung Galaxy S II were available in the US earlier. Next up is Motorola, very close by, RIM and its BlackBerries, LG, Palm and finally Nokia.

It’s logical that Nokia is found on the last place in the survey, considering how little love and fame it’s been enjoying lately in the US. Maybe with the Windows Phone pairing it will gain the US public on its side, but till then customer satisfaction is not so good and neither are local sales. I guess that return rates also have something to do with these figures, right?

The number was 24.5% in April, so Samsung has been experiencing growth. Coming in second is LG, which is no surprise, since they’ve been pulling off some nifty Optimus devices lately, so they earned the 20.9% market share that they’ve kept since April. Third is the freshly Google bought Motorola, with 14.1%, a decrease from April’s 15.6%.

As far as the smartphone platform market share goes, this one involved the 82.2 million people in the US with smartphones and 34 months of study ending in July 2011. Android dominates the charts, with 41.8%, a huge 5.4% increase from the past study, in April. On second spot there’s Apple, with 27%, a 1% increase from April, showing that the Cupertino giant is hanging tight.

RIM gets third place with 21.7%, a huge disappointment here, since they dropped 4%. More data from the study can be found in the source link below, if you’re curios.

Back in April, Android took over the ad market, owning 53% of it, as iOS dropped 1% and Windows Phone got an extra 0.5% added to its market share. RIM held on to the 17% it had during the same time frame, while Symbian is not even worth mentioning. As far as ad revenue is concerned, iOS leads the pack with 45% of ad sales, followed by Android with 43% and RIM’s also in the stats with 9% of ad sales.

Still the Blackberries are doing better than the Windows Phone models and Symbian with their 3% ad revenue. Android is doing superbly, while iOS is also at the top and Windows Phone is starting to get some credit. Meanwhile, RIM tries to keep contact with the top and Symbian is ready for the big abyss.

Android grew 1.7% in April, going from 34.7%  to 36.4%, while iOS stands on second place, reaching 26% up from 25.5% in March. This last move was enough to surpass BlackBerry, that dropped 1.4%, now being at 25.7%. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Phone are now at 6.7% after the drop mentioned above, while HP’s webOS is already below the 5% share.

Analysts are saying that this OS probably won’t make it past Christmas, unless HP has something surprising to show. With the recent announcement of iOS 5, I can only see Apple’s platform growing in the future, although their latest platform looks a bit similar to Android, so that’s not quite a big plus for them.

Samsung got 24.8% of the subscribers back in December 2010, while the 3 months ending in March made them reach a percentage of 24.5%, which is still number one. On second spot we find LG, with 20.9% in December 2010 and the same figure in this year’s first trimester. Motorola and RIM get 15.8% and 8.4% respectively in the same time frame, with Moto losing almost 1% in three months.

Finally, Apple’s next, with 7.9% of the market, up from 6.8% at the end of the past year. ComScore also published stats regarding the top smartphone platforms in the last three months of 2010, in comparison with the first 3 months this year. We’ve found out that RIM had 31.6% back in 2010, while now it dropped 27.1%.

Android is king with 34.7% in March, up from 28.7% in December 2010, while Apple is third with 25.5% now, up from 25% in December. Microsoft lost a bit of market share, so it’s a 7.5%, down from 8.4%. Finally, Palm isn’t taking the HP buyout well, with a mere 2.8% now, compared to the 3.7% of last year. Will webOS and WP7 make a surprise comeback in 2011?