We'll still have four major U.S. wireless operators for the forseeable future. Deutsche Telekom Chief Financial Officer Timotheus Hottges told Bloomberg the U.S. mobile market is already consolidated enough, dampening rumors the German phone company was looking to buy Sprint.

Microsoft's mobile woes lately only seem to get worse. After a week of service disruptions on the T-Mobile Sidekick, the carrier on Saturday informed customers that any personal data not currently on the smartphones had most likely been lost because of a server failure at Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which powers data services on the Sidekick. Oops. No backup.

With reports indicating Barnes & Noble is poised to throw its own e-reader into the ring, competition in the e-book market is about to get more intense. B&N will introduce a device as soon as next month featuring a six-inch screen from digital-paper maker E-Ink Corp. with a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard, like that on the iPhone, according to a Wall Street Journal story Friday, citing sources close to the matter.

Google's Android operating system is on a roll. Earlier this week, the search giant announced an alliance with Verizon Wireless that includes the launch of two Android phones this year with plans to develop other Android-powered devices in the future.

If Amazon is hoping its latest price cut for the Kindle will make the e-reader a bigger holiday season hit, it's going to have to do better. The reduction -- from $299 to $259 -- still leaves it $60 higher than Sony's starting price for its rival e-reader.

With the launch of its att.net mobile browser Monday, AT&T aims to extend full HTML Web browsing beyond smartphones to regular phones. The four new touchscreen handsets announced--the Pantech Reveal, Pantech Impact, Samsung Mythic and Samsung Flight-comes loaded with an Opera Software-powered browser designed to provide faster and easier Web surfing for the vast majority of mobile subscribers who don't own an iPhone.

With Vonage Monday launching new apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, questions were being raised about why the similar Google Voice app is still languishing in app approval limbo. The free Vonage app lets users make cheap international calls over both Wi-Fi and cellular networks. The VoIP app for the iPhone makes calls using Wi-Fi when it's available, but calls can also be routed over the voice network.

When it comes to the mobile Web, The Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus trope appears to be alive and well. Data released by Nielsen this week showed a sharp contrast between the sites that skew most heavily toward women or men. Overall, mobile Web use increased 34% to 57 million in the last year ending July. While men still make a larger portion of the mobile audience than women (53% to 47%), the number of female visitors year-over-year grew faster-43% to 26% for men.

The iPhone continued its global march in August, with the iPhone OS growing from a 33% to 40% market share worldwide, according to the latest monthly metrics from mobile ad network AdMob. The increase comes at the expense of older operating systems like Symbian and Windows Mobile.

With Apple announcing this week that iPhone application downloads have hit 2 billion, it raises the question of whether rival new app storefronts have any chance of ever catching up. At least one app developer and distributor believes a rising tide of iPhone apps will raise all boats. "There's no question in my mind that these other [mobile] operating systems like Android and BlackBerry will have extremely vibrant app ecosystems and are already well on the way," said Evan Conway, vice president of marketing for Handmark, which powers some 50 mobile content storefronts globally.