Gartner has this morning published its numbers for how the mobile handset industry has performed in Q3. The topline figure is that the mobile industry overall continues to see pressure from the wider economic downturn, and the gradual move away from cheaper, low end feature devices: overall sales of 428 million units for the quarter are 3% down on the same quarter last year. But smartphones continue to outshine that by quite a lot: they are up by 47% to 169 milion units. In other words, smartphones accounted for about 40% of al mobile device sales in Q3.
Still, that decline of 3% over last year was seen as encouraging by Gartner, since it was still an improvement over Q2, in which 419 million mobile devices were sold.
“After two consecutive quarter of decline in mobile phone sales, demand has improved in both mature and emerging markets as sales increased sequentially,” writes Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. He points out that in China — currently the world’s largest mobile market — smartphones were the biggest driver of sales, with demand for feature devices “weak.” In mature markets, he says that part of the good news story came in the form of new devices, such as the iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III.
Free, open source software projects have relied on a wide array of strategies and procedures to attract new contributors. Retaining newcomers and having them become valued sustainable contributors is a much more delicate challenge. What a person experiences when he or she is a project newcomer seems to have an important impact on the kind of contributor this person will become within a project. 
“While the technology of Linux and open-source in general is flexible and robust, the community and social dynamics that make it all possible are much more interesting to me,” Burleson-Davis, who lives in Austin, Texas, said via email.
