Research company Gartner says worldwide mobile device sales reached 325.6 million units in the second quarter of 2010, a 13.8% increase year-on-year. 19% of all those sales were smartphones, up 50.5% from Q2 2009.

Research In Motion has announced the new BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone, the first device that’ll run the BlackBerry 6 operating system. It’s also the first BlackBerry handset to combine a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen.

The United Arab Emirates will suspend a number of online services used by BlackBerry devices - BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry email and BlackBerry web browsing – from 11th October, according to the UAE's official news agency.

The decision has been made by the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), which has been concerned for a number of years that BlackBerry devices route these online services off-shore.

Strategy Analytics has calculated that global smartphone shipments grew 43% year-on-year to reach 60 million units by the end of Q2 2010. Nokia is top overall with 40% of the global market; Research In Motion leads in the Americas and is in second place globally with a 19% market share. Apple is in third place. Overall, Strategy Analytics says 19% of handsets shipped in Q2 were smartphones.

Apple's admission that its iPhone 4 has reception problems when held a certain way – and its insistence that other manufacturers have the same issues – has prompted angry responses from other manufacturers. We've heard comments from HTC, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung… and the co-CEOs of RIM (Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie) have published a joint statement on the company blog: