One of the biggest sources of new searches in the coming years for Google will come from mobile devices, which is why it is attacking mobile on multiple fronts—with Android phones, mobile apps, and mobile search across multiple devices. One of its more impressive efforts lately has been around voice search. Not every phone has a touchscreen or a full keyboard, and some languages simply aren’t keyboard-friendly, and that is where voice search comes in extra handy.

Google already has impressive voice search capabilities on the iPhone, Android, and other phones in English. But today, it is extending voice search to Mandarin Chinese and to Nokia S60 series phones. There are so many different accents and nuances to spoken Chinese, which is the most popular language in the world, that getting the speech-to-text good enough to return relevant searches is a huge challenge.

With the Holiday Season nearly upon us, we at TechCrunch thought it would behoove us to share with everyone a definitive list of the best smartphones currently available (or launching shortly), so as to help with any possible purchasing decisions which may occur in the upcoming months.

In making our decisions, we looked at these phones from the standpoint of the consumer. Thus, developer struggles, business security, and other such problems were not taken into account. Instead, functionality, price, and the overall usefulness of various smartphones made up the criteria which we adhered to during our reviews. These phones can be found on a multitude of carriers, operating systems, and continents.

The damn ink isn’t even dry on the Dopplr acquisition by Nokia that everyone said would never happen (it did). And yet, we’re now hearing rumors that Nokia is quietly looking for a buyer to take the travel social network off their hands.

Whoa. What? The deal was announced on September 24. It’s been less than a month. Not even eBay throws away acquisitions that quickly.

According to our source, all Nokia really wanted from the acquisition was the team, particularly CEO Marko Ahtisaari (formerly a star Nokia guy) and CTO Matt Biddulph. Suddenly, Mike Butcher’s article about the deal on TechCrunch Europe makes a lot of sense.

Nokia has filed a compaint against Apple for infringing on its GSM, UMTS, and WiFi “standards,” which is as absolutely vague as it sounds. While Nokia states that forty vendors have licensed its patents in these areas there is no mention of the specific instances of infringement and, given that GSM, UMTS, and WiFi are the defacto standards for GSM-based phones across the board it’s hard to tell what Nokia’s real problem is here.

Nokia, for example, has a few thousand patents dealing with UMTS alone while this one, #7,599,665, seems to deal specfically with radio hand-off between GSM/EDGE, UMTS, and WiFi.

Paranormal Activity is simply the scariest movie I have ever seen. I saw it last weekend, and still get major chills when I think about it. The movie is also a phenomenon – creator Oren Peli spent $10,000 or so making the movie, and it has grossed over $33 million so far, crushing competitors who have far more screens.

And now the advertisers are jumping all over it. Trust me, this is just the beginning.

Nokia has a new site up to promote their Maemo operating system, Maemoproject.com, which has a similar camera setup to Paranormal Activity. Watch long enough and something happens (around 10 minutes).

Whatever this is, look for an official release this Thursday. My guess is Nokia wants Maemo to be known as the scariest product ever. That makes sense, right?

So finally the official word is in, with a very short blog post by CEO Marko Ahtisaari: Dopplr has been acquired by Nokia.

Update: Nokia’s press release

Update 2: Dopplr angel investor Martin Varsavsky on the deal: ‘Nokia as a force of good in the European start up scene’

No word on price, but when Michael Arrington broke the news last week on TechCrunch, he wrote that Nokia had picked up the fledgling company for between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates).

Nokia has been on an acquisition tear lately, albeit mostly small deals (Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side all this year). A source close to the deal says that they’ve just made one more acquisition: boutique travel social network Dopplr, headquartered in London.

The purchase price, we’ve heard, is between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates). Dopplr cofounder and CEO Marko Ahtisaari was previously the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia.

We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding. The site has never grown to huge usage, but core users are passionate about the service, which lets them share travel plans with friends. And they’ve supposedly raised just €1.25 million or so in total funding.

Update: TechCrunch Europe has more analysis.

At the Nokia World 2009 event in Stuttgart, Nokia Beta Labs has announced a number of new services ready for testing right now. The most interesting one is Ovi Lifecasting, an application we caught wind of yesterday but is now ready for limited early bird beta-testing.

Also new is an extension of Nokia Messaging called Social Messaging, which interestingly Nokia calls the groundwork for an impending proprietary multi-community social networking client.

There are no shortage of whispers out there right now as to what Facebook’s plans for location are. With rival Twitter having recently announced its geolocation API, the pressure is on the larger network to deliver something. Tomorrow will bring a step in that direction, as Nokia will announce a new service at its Nokia World event that will utilize location within Facebook, we’ve learned.

Now, to be clear, this is not Facebook officially getting into the game itself yet, but it’s big enough that Henri Moissinac, Facebook’s director of mobile, will apparently be using his keynote address at Nokia World to unveil this, we’ve heard.

The app looks to be a direct result of the Nokia purchase of the location-based social network Plazes, in the summer of 2008. As you can see in the screenshot below, an Ovi Map (Nokia’s map property) will reside inside of Facebook and show where you are. It can also update your Facebook status with your location, and a link to it on one of these maps.

Waaaay back in May, we put up just shy of 750 words jam-packed with details on Nokia’s unannounced N900 Internet Tablet. This morning, Nokia finally pulled back the curtains on the device – and man, we absolutely nailed it.

Though we would have expected Nokia to announce this at next week’s Nokia World event, they’ve gone and verified all of the details we’d mentioned previously. 3.5″ 800×480 touchscreen? Check. 32GB internal storage? Check. 5 megapixel camera, T-Mobile USA friendly 1700mhz bands, and running Maemo 5? Three checks, please.

Earlier today, Nokia announced that it was launching Nokia Money, a new payment service powered by Obopay that allows users to send money to friends, merchants, and service companies simply by using their phone numbers. The service will be showcased in early September at the Nokia World conference, with plans to roll it out to select markets in 2010.

As we wrote when news broke of Obopay’s $70 million funding round (of which Nokia was a major participant in), one of the biggest markets for this technology is in regions like India, where many people have phones with pre-paid SIM cards but don’t have bank accounts. And judging by Nokia’s press release, which emphasizes that there are “4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”, the company seems to agree.

Know what’s popular nowadays? Netbooks! Nokia is officially jumping on the netbook bullet train with the “Booklet 3G” — an Intel/Microsoft-based netbook that promises 12-hour battery life, a weight of 2.75 pounds, and apparently built-in GPS. The “3G” portion of the name indicates a wireless data connection as well.

Actual specs and details will be announced by Nokia on September 2nd, but it’s believed that the Booklet 3G will run Windows 7. The 12-hour battery life is interesting, too, as that’s a full four hours longer than most netbooks currently on the market. It’ll be interesting to see which Atom CPU is used in the machine to obtain that kind of longevity. It may be a slower but less power-hungry Z-series CPU since the 10-inch Booklet will have a higher-resolution screen (likely 1280×800 or 1366×768).

Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks “the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,” says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually.

But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia’s E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:

German mobile startup Cellity is getting acquired by Nokia. The sale price was not disclosed, but it is not likely to be more than $10 million to $20 million. The deal was all cash. About a year ago, Vodafone bought Cellity’s competitor Zyb for 31.5 million Euros.

Nokia didn’t actually buy the whole company, only “certain assets” and the team, which is usually code for a fire sale. The company began talking to Nokia six months ago, and in the end there was actually a little bit of a bidding war with Netherlands mobile carrier KPN and an international web portal. Cellity had a Series A round of funding in 2007, led by Mangrove Capital Partners.

Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You’d be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.

I’ve had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device – but I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking – some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.

I wasn’t missing anything.

The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-person audience.

The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry, a new mobile operator that promised to “revolutionize the telecom world”. Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical.

Then the company’s CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn’t need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service.

When Nokia launched its Ovi Store for mobile applications a month ago, it was clear that – despite its less than stellar launch – it would be a mistake to simply dismiss the Finnish mobile juggernaut’s efforts as meaningless. The company may be struggling to stay relevant on the software and services side, but with a reach like Nokia’s on the handset distribution level I think it goes without saying that a lot of eyes are firmly fixed on Nokia’s initiatives in the field.

There was some criticism about the lack of content on the Ovi Store at launch day, particularly because of the fact that a lot of big names were lacking, but I figured I should give it at least a month to see if and how many developers would flock to the platform. Now, I think it’s time to take a look at where they stand after that month, and I thought I’d start by comparing the content offering to that of Apple’s App Store.

Here are some notes from Intel’s “breaking news” conference call with Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager, Ultra Mobility Group and Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia.

• Intel and Nokia have formed a long-term strategic partnership to create an open standard for a new mobile computing platform built upon Linux-based operating systems.
• Intel will acquire a Nokia HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products — will complement Intel’s Wi-Fi and WiMax offerings.

So is it a new Nokia phone with an Intel chipset? Is it a new Nokia netbook?

No. Not yet, at least. They’re not ready to talk about products today. The two companies basically announced that they’ll be teaming up to work on future mobile computing devices — not quite as exciting as it seemed earlier today, at least not from a hardware/gadget angle.

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will rise to north of 700 million units, up 22% from this year. The report goes into the various schemes that have been implemented to help ‘connect the unconnected’, or the estimated 3 billion people on the planet that do not own mobile phones.

Apparently, the key to be able to tap into this vast pool of potential customers in these so-called ‘emerging markets’ lies in drastically reducing the cost of handsets that can be used by low-income users.

With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enough: Beginning with this morning’s release of the North American model N97, Qik will come preloaded onto all Nokia S60-based phones.