Once again I’m a little behind in getting out my weekly wrap-up, but this week I have a really really good reason. As most of you should know, last night was the gold medal hockey game between the US and Canada. I’m a huge hockey fan (comes with my Canadian roots) and yesterday’s game was one of the most exciting I’ve ever seen. In the end, the better team one (of course, I’m biased). Needless to say, I didn’t get much work done yesterday, hence the delay in today’s wrap-up.

Last week’s mobile news was a little sparse but that was expected following the flurry of activity around the Mobile World Conference. One of the more interesting stories was about mobile at the Olympics. Yahoo said they saw huge spikes in mobile searches related to every aspect of the Olympics. This doesn’t surprise me. The mobile web is fast becoming an integral part of our daily lives and with quick accessibility to info and news anytime, anywhere. What did surprise me are some of the key stats for searches on Yahoo last week:

• Searches “ice skating rinks” were up 607%
• Searches for “red Olympic mittens” were up 182% (um, there were searches for this before the Olympics?)
• Searches for Lindsey Vonn were up 1,446%
• Searches for “Shaun White snowboarding” were up 1,921%

Yahoo also built a specific mobilesite for the games sharing info, announcements, and results. This is truly the future of sporting events as the mobile web allows attendees to enhance their in-venue experience and for non-attendees to follow along. Well done Yahoo!

The other big story this week that caught my attention was Gartner’s latest worldwide smartphone sales and marketshare numbers. Overall, smartphone shipments were up 24% from the year before. The iPhone doubled its smartphone marketshare to 14% taking most of their growth away from Symbian (which is used by Nokia and I’ve discussed their slide in previous posts). BlackBerry ended up with 20% marketshare which represents a growth of 3%. So, for all of you who keep telling me that the iPhone is stealing marketshare from BlackBerry, it’s just not true. The iPhone is gaining ground but at Nokia’s expense, not BlackBerry.

As always, here are the latest handset rumors, announcements and reviews I found this week:

• HTC Supersonic (or Incredible) spotted on video?
• Motorola Backflip for AT&T unboxing and hands-on
• Motorola Cliq XT with T-Mobile branding caught in the wild
• Snapdragon powered LG LU9400 Arena Max touchscreen phone lands on LG Telecom as Maxx
• Review: Motorola Devour
• LG hopes to launch their first Windows Phone 7 handset around September or November
• Nokia E72 smartphone review – all business
• HTC Incredible sneaks into Verizon’s inventory system
• Windows Phone 7 devices will come in three flavors
• HTC Desire headed for AT&T, Sprint picks up Legend (as Hero2)?
• Checking out Acer’s low-cost beTouch e110 Android smartphone
• Acer Liquid e comes to North America by way of Rogers Wireless
• LG GD510 Pop touchscreen feature phone surpasses one million sales, new colors coming soon
• Nexus One for Verizon takes one big step closer to reality, clears the FCC

To finish off this week’s update, here are a few other articles I want to share with you:

• RIM’s free BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express is available now
• Survey: 26% of Americans Get News via Phone
• T-Mobile USA reports Q4 2009 subscriber growth, but lower earnings
• Sprint to launch 4G network in at least 8 major markets this year
• Mobile phone subscriptions expected to exceed 5 billion in 2010, global mobile prices falling
• Microsoft updates Marketplace – smartphone apps can now install to memory cards
• MWC Attendance Reaches 49,000
• Opera Software Posts 87% Slump in Q4 Profits

See or hear anything else interesting in mobile.  Let us know by leaving a comment below.