As we’re quickly approaching the end of 2011 we take a last look at what the year for mobile operating systems has been like.

Would it surprise you to know that Symbian finished 2011 stronger than it started the year? The much-maligned operating system is still number 1, ahead of Android, iOS, and the others.

Read on to find out more.

Now that 2011 is coming to an end and the new year is looming, we thought it would be a good time for a quick recap of some of the most interesting posts we’ve put out this year. You may very well have missed some of them, especially if you’re not a regular reader.

Here’s our selection in chronological order. We hope you enjoy reading these as much as we enjoyed writing them!

Facebook currently has more than 800 million active users. With a world population having just passed the 7 billion barrier, that would mean that around 11% of people on Earth are on Facebook.

That’s of course not necessarily true, as there are organizations and businesses that have Facebook accounts, and some individuals may have more than one, but it’s a staggering number nonetheless.

But in which countries does the population take more to Facebook than in others? Some say that Philippines is number one with 93.9% of the Pinoy population on Facebook. Read on for our very own top 10 list.

With an estimated 2 billion Internet users as of March 2011, about a third of the world’s population is online. That still leaves almost 5 billion people around the world that are not connected, a huge potential for the coming years.

But things are developing fast. For most of us, an Internet connection at home and at work is something we’ve had for perhaps 15 years by now.

To better understand how fast it has developed, we used data from the World Bank to visualize Internet adoption over the past 20 years. Read on to find out what it looks like.

When visiting a website we usually expect it to have multiple pages.

But haven’t you also come across websites with just a single page? In other words, there’s just a homepage and nothing else to click on to.

Now it seems like the single-page website may be a dying breed. We looked at the numbers and here’s what we found.

It’s a tradition that some say predates celebrating Christmas. Bringing a real miniature pine tree in to your home at this time of year and putting all kinds of shiny decorations on it, is something that happens in millions of homes around the world.

If you don’t already have a Christmas tree put up at your place it may be too late to arrange one for this year. However, we hope we can give you some ideas for the future.

We put together a wide selection of alternative trees, ranging from one built from a small circuit board, to a huge one made out of Lego.

Although we have tackled Christmas trees and decorations in the past, this time we’re all about the trees.

Comments from readers is an important part of most blogs out there, and our own is no exception. We still run the default Wordpress comment functionality but have been thinking for a while now about installing some kind of third-party comment system.

Something like Disqus, Facebook Comments, Livefyre, or IntenseDebate would allow us greater functionality, spam management, moderation capabilities, and more.

But which system should we go for?

We investigated the Top 100 Technorati list to see what some of the biggest blogs in the world are using and here’s what we found.

There are presumably more Android phones and devices out there now than there are iPhones (and iPod Touches). However, it seems Android users keep holding their wallets much closer to their chests than iPhone users and iOS users in general.

Case in point, according to a new report from Distimo, the App Store for iPhone generates almost 4x as much revenue as Google’s Android Market in the US. This also includes revenues from in-app purchases. Even looking at just the App Store for iPad, it outclasses Android Market with 2x the revenue.

As you’re probably aware, Pingdom has been growing a lot over the past couple of years, and as more and more users have joined our service, our infrastructure has grown as well. Our monitoring network now consists of 40 locations that test your sites and servers.

Starting this week, we’re going to change how these monitoring locations monitor your sites. It’s not something most of you will notice, monitoring will be as reliable as ever, but we thought it was worth a blog post explaining what we’re doing and why to avoid any potential confusion.

HDD or SSD, that is the question. Do you want the speed that the Solid-State Drive offers or the value and storage space the Hard Disk Drive can give you? That is an issue facing many computer buyers today.

Although the price of SSD has fallen quite dramatically recently there is still no doubt that you get a lot more storage space for the money you spend on an HDD. So, when will SSD be as cheap as HDD?

We took a look at how prices for HDD and SSD have developed over the last few years and here’s what we found.

Do you have an itch when it comes to how your web browser works? Perhaps there’s some functionality you want from the browser that it doesn’t support, or it does something in a particular way that drives you nuts.

Chances are there is an extension to remedy that situation.

We have gone over most of the extensions available for Apple’s Safari web browser and come up with recommendations for 15 extensions that we think you should try.

You find all the extensions on Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. We can’t link to each individual extension, unfortunately, because the way Apple has built the site, so you have to go to the gallery and click your way to the extension you want.

There are millions upon millions of blogs available today, and many of them are hosted on dedicated blogging services. These kinds of services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for WordPress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr.

One of the main benefits of using a blogging service is that they make blogging easy. There’s no need to deal with traditional hosting. You blog, the blogging service keeps your content available online.

In theory, blogging services should also be able to make your blog more reliable since they have a lot of servers at their disposal, often spread across multiple data centers. If your blog gets flooded by traffic (usually a good thing), a blogging service has a much better chance handling it since your traffic is just a drop in the ocean for them. Had you been on a single server (or even a shared one), your site might not have coped.

As you may know, we’re working on a brand new control panel for Pingdom. We’re calling it My Pingdom, and we’ve been gradually rolling out parts of it to our users so they can play around with it and tell us what they think.

We’ve just updated My Pingdom again, adding access to a few more sections. Previously, only the “reports” section was available. Now you can also manage checks and contacts, and we’ve added a new “probe server” overview so you can see a full list of all our servers and their status.

We’ve also made some general tweaks based on your feedback, improved the way filters work in reports, and ironed out a few bugs we found in the old beta version.

We could read the headline “Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world” earlier this year.

For Microsoft this must have been welcome news as it announced that Windows 7 for the first time ever was used on more computers to browse the web than Windows XP.

We know that Microsoft wants users to retire Windows XP, so does this spell out the doom for the aging OS, which went into retail sales ten years ago in 2001?

We pulled out the latest statistics to investigate and we found that Windows XP is still alive and well in large parts of the world.

Twitter is growing and evolving, and the service clearly wants plenty of new users to join its folds. However, try registering a new Twitter account, and come up with a username that isn’t already registered. You’ll soon find that there’s some serious username depletion going on.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if the person who had already taken your brilliantly though-out nickname was actually using that Twitter account. But take a look around and you’ll find lots of examples of users who clearly have just created a Twitter account, signed in once or twice, and then never used the service again. And since Twitter accounts never expire, that username is now gone for all time.

And it’s not a small problem. Twitter could have more than 100 million unused accounts. In January, Twitter reported that it had almost 200 million registered users, a number that has surely grown significantly since then. In September, Twitter reported that it had 100 million active users (users who sign in at least once a month). Quite a difference.

How about paying almost $4,000 for a basic PC? Or $7,600 for a printer? That’s how much you would pay for some classic tech items if they were sold today with prices adjusted for inflation.

After having looked at classic hardware before here at Royal Pingdom, we now thought it would be interesting to dip into the pool of great gadgets again, this time focusing on prices.

So with the help of the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, we’ve brought prices of a few classic tech items into the current year.

As you will see, we should be very grateful for what we pay for most tech today.

There can’t be much doubt that the mobile web is exploding in popularity. From the first mobile web access offered commercially with the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone in Finland in 1996, things have moved fast.

Today we’re seeing increased sales in smartphones and tablets, faster mobile data connections, apps, and more. Basically, we’re accessing Internet services more and more from something that is not a PC.

We’ve put together some numbers to attempt to show a picture of what the mobile web was like so far in 2011, how it is has developed, and perhaps take a peek into the future as well.

Two web browsers currently use a rapid release schedule combined with automated updates. Chrome has had it from the start, and Firefox started using it this summer with the introduction of Firefox 5. Both Google and Mozilla release new versions every six weeks.

There are some differences between Chrome and Firefox as to how these automated updates work, but essentially the idea is that the browser should be updated to new versions automatically without bothering the user, and ensure that as many users as possible are running the very latest version. There are plenty of benefits to this approach.

However, we’ve noticed that this process seems less successful for Firefox than it is for Chrome. We pointed this out a while ago, noting that Firefox now leaves a good number of users behind with every new version.

Besides the pocket protector, every geek has to have a wristwatch. The problem is that it can’t just be any old watch. It has to be connected to the Internet, work as a calculator, show the weather forecast, and of course also tell time.

But of course only a small percentage of geeks will actually wear a wristwatch, relying instead on smartphones. However, we feel obliged to point out some alternatives should you choose to put a timepiece on your wrist.

We scoured the web to find 10 wristwatches that we think would work perfectly of you.

Apache is still the undisputed king of web server software but according to the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey from November 2011, NGINX usage has grown almost 300% over the last year.

In real numbers NGINX increased from about 15 million sites a year ago to 43 million in November 2011. That’s a faster growth than any other web server software tracked by Netcraft.

Since we’re big fans of NGINX at Pingdom, we wanted to try to understand this tremendous growth, so we put some questions to Andrew Alexeev (Q&A further down). Andrew looks after Business Development and Marketing for NGINX Inc., the company formed in October this year, backed by $3 million in venture funding, with the intent to expand the open source NGINX project and explore commercial opportunities.