Worldwide sales of mobile phones ended up surpassing 1.15 billion units in 2007, a 16 percent increase from 2006 sales of 990.9 million, according to figures from Gartner.

Emerging markets, especially China and India, are now the driver for growth, with many people in the countries now buying their first phone.

Nokia continues to dominate. It sold 435 million mobile phones last year, and gained a market share of more than 40 percent for the first time during the fourth quarter, according to Gartner. During 2007, Nokia’s market share was 37.8 percent.

It is followed by Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and LG. Everyone except for Motorola, which lost its second place to Samsung during the fourth quarter, increased its market share.

For the full year, Motorola’s market share was 14.3 percent, down from 21.1 percent.

Samsung increased its market share from 11.8 percent to 13.4 percent.

Sony Ericsson and LG saw their share increase by less than 1 percent, to 8.8 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively.

Looking forward to this year, sales will continue to grow, according to Gartner. Nokia has the chance to extend its lead even further, with growth in North America the key.

“In most markets, Nokia’s market share is larger than 40 percent; in North America, it’s close to 10 percent,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner.

The Finnish phone giant has tried, and failed, to crack the North American market for many years. But changes in the market will help Nokia, according to Carolina Milanesi.

“Verizon has said it plans to open its network, which might be more on paper than in reality. But North American carriers are starting to realize they need to be more flexible than in the past. For Nokia, and everyone else, it means not having to build Verizon-specific phones, and faster time to market,” she said.

In 2008, Nokia will also need to continue to improve its portfolio, offering not only more applications and functions, but also novel designs and improved user interfaces.

Nokia has recently received criticism for not releasing phones equipped with touch-based user interfaces.

“I don’t think it matters that Nokia is a little late to the market, as long as it gets it right. Nokia will have to ‘wow’ users, otherwise it will be crucified,” said Milanesi.

Nokia was also late to the market with 3G phones, but became the biggest vendor in the end.

“Nokia built a platform, and was able to release a lot of phones, which made it No. 1,” said Milanesi. She also thinks Sony Ericsson can grow its market share during 2008.

“Sony Ericsson has a very interesting lineup. With the addition of Windows Mobile, it has a chance to grow in North America,” said Milanesi.

A big question for 2008 is the future of Motorola’s mobile phone business. If it decides to sell, it’s likely that the buyer will be a Chinese vendor, like ZTE.

“If it [ZTE] has the money,” Milanesi said.

In Windows Server 2008, Microsoft delivers a 64-bit server OS with a smaller minimum resource footprint than Windows Vista. It varies by edition; Windows Server 2008 Datacenter doesn’t focus so much on shedding the pounds, but it, too, picks up the speed benefits from the slimmer Server Core, which was created to be a practically weightless virtualized guest OS. IT shops are likely to use Windows Server 2008 the same way they use Windows Server 2003 now, only now they can run lots of independent virtual Windows Servers that scale in features and footprint across a broad range of options

Windows Server 2008 remains a component of the Windows Server System, so Microsoft has not instituted a free lunch program. Functions like e-mail and collaboration, database, and robust edge services are add-ons that most deployments will require. But these can be placed at the host level, with virtualized guests distributing applications and services that utilize Windows Server components. In other words, one license of Exchange Server or SQL Server will stretch further than ever before.

How low it can go
I spent most of my time testing Windows Server 2008 Enterprise on an eight-core, two-socket AMD Barcelona reference server. When you align the features of the Barcelona architecture with Windows Server 2008′s capabilities, you come away with the impression that AMD designed its CPU with Windows Server 2008 in mind. Having talked with Barcelona’s architects, I’ll bend nondisclosure just enough to say that to call Barcelona a Windows Server 2008 hardware architecture is not far-fetched.

Windows Server 2008 is built for virtualization. All SKUs up to Datacenter are tooled for what you might call “buffet” scalability. You can choose, with finer granularity than is possible under Windows Server 2003, the server features you want to run, where you want to run them, and what portion of total resources are dedicated to them. For example, Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 has split Web application services functionality into some 40 independently loadable plug-ins. It is similar in concept to Apache’s modular approach, but IIS’s approach is safer, more transparent, and much easier to manage. This is a nice fit for server roles, a feature introduced in Windows Server 2003 that provides simple on/off switches and wizards that bring up and shut down groups of services according to need. Windows Server 2008 continues Windows Server’s tradition of server roles, but adds finer-grained, modular control over individual features. You can still do a blunderbuss deployment in which a Windows Server host or guest role is “all,” but it is well worth IT managers’ and administrators’ time to learn to match server roles, and modular services within those roles, to user and application requirements. Do that, and you’ll have servers that will make physical-to-virtual transitions and virtual machine relocation uncommonly easy.

One road you won’t need to take to slenderize Windows Server 2008 is to run it as a 32-bit (x86) OS instead of 64-bit (x64). You’ve heard hype that the overhead of going to 64 bit, especially for virtual guests, is substantial enough to blow x64 off unless you know you need access to a 64-bit virtual address space (as if that knowledge were easy to come by). Dismiss this as noise. The 32-bit server OS is the HD DVD of IT, even for virtual guests. It’s time to step into the future.