MANILA, Philippines — The little guys continue with their role as the high-tech sector's marching band.

Smartphones and tablet computers remain at the forefront of the market's unrelenting surge forward. These mobile gadgets are leading the market's efforts to develop and adopt new technologies, and take consumers' money from their wallets, with consumers none the less merry for it, of course.

There will come a time, when new technologies mean today's smartphones and tablets will go the way of the floppy disk drive and typewriter. For today, however, the iPhone, Android phones, BlackBerry, with Windows Phone smartphones trying hard to catch up, are what make the tech world quite an exciting place.

Windows Phone Apps at 60K Mark

Non-Windows fans, for the longest time, have been using the "there are no enough apps for Windows phones" line to put down every argument for the Windows Phone. Although most everybody knows that it is not the quantity but the quality of applications that counts, nobody seems immune to using this troll, I mean tool, to bash Microsoft's latest attempt to matter in the smartphone segment.

Recently, however, the Windows Phone Marketplace trumpeted its achievement of reaching the 60,000-application milepost.

The software company added more than 10,000 new apps to the online market in just 25 days. Reports reveal that around 400 applications are being added everyday into the market.

Finally, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is becoming relevant. Most industry observers believe that Nokia's Lumia 800 smartphones, which have been selling quite well since its UK launch before Christmas, play a significant role in this Microsoft mobile renaissance.

Windows Marketplace might be several hundreds of thousands behind Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market, but Microsoft's online apps store is growing fast. In fact, it's growing faster than its rival markets did in their early days.

Sony's Thinner CMOS Sensor

Expect future cameras to come in bodies much thinner than today's cameras are. Japan's consumer electronics giant Sony has developed a thinner and more efficient back-illuminated complementary metal-oxide semiconductor or CMOS that can pave the way for higher-quality cameras for standalone cameras, and for smartphones and other portable gadgets.

Sony's new CMOS technology will allow it to manufacture digital cameras' circuit section as an "independent chip," which makes the manufacture of more compact gadgets with less noise.

The new image sensor comes with Sony's RGBW Coding technology, which reduces noise and allows low-light image capture.

Hmm. This means thinner iPhones, Androids, and Windows Phones.

Jailbreakers

That didn't take long.

The Chronic Dev Team and pod2g have released their first untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

Apple's less-than-faithful consumers will now be able to access third-party app libraries to install apps not authorized by the late Steve Jobs' chief acolytes.

That's all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.