Apple and Samsung are the only two smartphone manufacturers currently seeing any growth in the United States. The pair are slowly eating away at the market share held by their rivals, including LG, Motorola, Research in Motion, and HTC. In the three months leading up to November 2012, Samsung increased its market share from 25.7% to 26.9%, but Apple is catching up with the Cupertino company enjoying slightly more growth.

Angry Birds continues to be one of the most successful games available on Android and iOS, and despite already racking up more than 1 billion downloads across all platforms, it continues to be a big seller. This Christmas, the surge in Android and iOS sales saw Angry Birds downloads boosted again. In just one week, the title was downloaded more than 30 million times.

Microsoft has beaten Apple and Google to the acquisition of R2 Studios, a small home entertainment technology startup from the founder of Sling Media. R2 is famous for an Android app that allows users to control things like lighting and appliances throughout their homes, and its thought the company’s technology will help Microsoft push its Xbox console even further into home entertainment.

A release date and price for the Sony Xperia Z, one of two new Sony handsets set to make their debut at CES next week, has been revealed by a leaked image. Formerly known as the Yuga, the Xperia Z is set to be Sony’s next flagship smartphone, with a 1080p display, and a super speedy quad-core processor on board. So how much is it going to cost?

It appears Samsung is hard at work on a new Android handset that combines a physical QWERTY keyboard with a touchscreen, possibly to succeed the Galaxy M Pro GT. The new handset has been pictured out in the wild running the Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and it sports the GT-B7810 model number that was approved by the FCC back in June 2012.