Nokia is the latest mobile manufacturer to release preliminary quarterly results, which come just a fortnight ahead of the company’s formal full-year announcement on 24th January.

It estimated that 86.3 million mobile devices were shipped in the quarter, including 9.3 million touch-screen Asha handsets, 4.4 million Lumia smartphones and 2.2 million Symbian smartphones.

Huawei has presented its first Windows Phone 8 smartphone at CES 2013. It’s called the Ascend W1 and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 dual-core 1.2 GHz processor.

The phone has a 4-inch 480x800 screen and a 5 megapixel camera along with a 1950 mAh battery that promises up to 470 hours of standby time.

A new research report from Analysys Mason predicts that Windows Phone will become the fastest-growing smartphone operating system in the next five years. However, it will still only have a single-digit percentage share of the smartphone market in 2017.

Last year, Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS was shipped in 11 million devices. In 2017 this figure is expected to reach 136 million units; approximately the same number of Apple devices shipped in 2012.

Mark Bridge writes:

Predicting the future is easy. Making accurate predictions is more of a challenge. In our final podcast of 2012 we've provided a forecast for the mobile telecoms industry in 2013 - and we've also looked back at last year's expectations.

So... what do the three of us at TheFonecast.com expect from mobile phones and wireless technology next year?

Smartphone penetration across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom hit 54.6% during the three-month period from August to the end of October 2012, according to the comScore MobiLens service. It found that Spain had the highest smartphone penetration in Europe (63.2% of mobile phone users) followed by the UK at 62.3%.

Spain also had the most dramatic growth, up almost 15 percentage points from last year.