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Our hope for Motorola has been waning of late. But the same can't be said for an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co., who says Moto plans to launch 10 smartphones in the second half of the year.

OK, so this is from a stocks analyst and not an actual announcement from Motorola, so we'll be taking this with a grain of salt. But we thought we saw at least one WinMo phone in those renderings late last year, so Moto might still have something else up its sleeve.

But if Moto's going to crank out 10 smartphones this year, the question remains, will they be Windows Mobile? Android? Or something else?

Associated Press via Forbes & Fierce Wireless

Someone apparently had enough of their Samsung Omnia and decided to torture the heck out of it. Needless to say, we don't think drowning in beer is going to be covered by your warranty.

But what a way to go.

Via DailyMobile.se

Don't want to wait on Windows Mobile 6.5 but don't want to mess with hacked ROMs, either? XDA Developers (who else!) has got you covered.

If you have a QVGA phone and SPB Mobile Shell Verson 2.1.5, you can download a theme that will skin your phone like WinMo 6.5. Pretty slick. But, yeah, the problem is it's only available for QVGA phones right now. Let's hope that gets scaled up real soon.

But if you're in the market, head on over to XDA Developers and try out mtstmp's creation.

Yet another cool app has been unceremoniously yanked from the unreleased Touch Pro 2 (aka Rhodium).

Up till now, HTC has been content with modifying more of the superficial aspects of WinMo. But now it's tackling notifications ... making 'em all purty-like.

Over at XDA (via ppcgeeks), dharvey4651 has pulled up this app and .cab'd it up for your convenience. Users are advised to have build 21000 or higher before installation. There also is a little bug that requires you to dismiss the notification manually, which causes an extra step. 

But if you just can't wait for that new HTC goodness, by all means hop on over and give it a shot!

In business, it's all about doing better. Month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. You need to do better than before. That's growth.

And numbers published today by the analysts at Gartner show that Windows Mobile is far from dead. Specifically, worldwide sales to end users were up 12.2 percent from 2007 to 2008, giving Windows Mobile 11.8 percent of the 2008 market share, behind Symbian and Research in Motion.

OK, WinMo's growth wasn't anywhere near as strong as RIM's (96.7 percent) or Apple's (245.7 percent!) or even Palm's (42.2 percent). But it's positive growth. The Symbian OS fell 6.1 percent from 2007 to 2008 but still has a little more than half of the world's market share. (For more on that, check out Nokia Experts' own Matthew Miller over at ZDNet.)  BlackBerry has 16.6 percent of the market, followed by Windows Mobile at 11.8 percent. The iPhone came in fourth at 8.2 percent.

What's it all mean? The smartphone industry is growing by leaps and bounds. Windows Mobile isn't dead, and there's still plenty of geeky goodness to go around.

JKOnTheRun via ZDNet

The Samsung C6625 got the briefiest of mentions at Mobile World Congress and has been up for pre-order at Expansys, but other than that we haven't had too much to go on. But now it's been outed as the C6620 at Sammy's Netherlands Web site. [via Mobilejaw]

Here's what we're looking at:

• Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard.
• 2.6-inch, 320x240 display.
• Tri-band EDGE (900/1800/1900) and just the 2100MHz band for 3G.
• 1,300 mAh battery.
• 2MP camera.

For the rest of the deets, brush up on your Dutch and head on over.

We're not expecting the C6620 anywhere near the U.S. anytime soon, especially with the lone 3G band. But it's nice to see a new WinMo Standard phone coming from the venerable Blackjack maker.

Microsoft this morning released a little more information about its Windows Marketplace for Mobile (that name sounds pretty official now), centering on what developers can expect with regards to Windows Mobile 6.5.

Here's the bottom line, in handy bullet points:

• Annual registration is $99 and includes submission of five applications. Each additional submission within the annual period is another $99.
• Devs will set their own prices.
• Devs will keep 70 percent of the sales revenue.
• Student developers can have the registration fee waived through the DreamSpark program.

Before anyone starts with the M$FT comments, that 30 percent cut Microsoft takes is right in line with what Apple's doing in its App Store, and the rest is pretty much in line, too. What remains to be is see is what the ramifications will be on other vendors, such as Mobihand and Handango, and whether large software houses such as SPB and SBSH will join in.

Full presser can be read here.

Update: Video from Marketplace Product Manager Inigo Lopez and Eric Nelson of the Developer Experience team after the break.