By now, everybody should have shaken off their post-Valentine’s blues.

This corner sincerely hopes none of my half-a-dozen readers did anything stupid during the day for lovers. And if you did, well, I guess it’s rather too late to be regretful about it.

As my favorite senior citizen was fond of saying, “It’s done. Now, let’s move on.”

So, on we go and return our attention to what’s happening in the world of consumer technology.

Gartner Rains On Mobile Parade

Market research firm Gartner was carrying some gloomy message for the mobile phone industry.

Data and analysis presented by the company revealed sales of mobile phones worldwide fell 1.7 percent to 1.75 billion units in 2012. In contrast, rival research firm IDC said sales actually grew 1.2 percent last year.

Back to Gartner’s less palatable announcement, the company said the record sales of smartphones, which reached 207.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012, failed to compensate for the 19.3 percent drop in sales of feature phones during the quarter.

Gartner research analyst Anshul Gupta said “tough economic conditions, shifting consumer preferences, and intense market competition” took their toll on the world mobile phone market.

Apple and Samsung together accounted for 52 percent of the smartphone market, up from 46.4 percent from the third quarter.

Apple Loses iPhone in Brazil

Apple lost its legal battle for the right to use the iPhone name in Brazil. The country’s agency responsible for granting trademarks rejected Apple’s request to use the brand name for its smartphones.

The agency ruled in favor of IGB Eletronica SA, the Brazilian electronics manufacturer that applied to register the name in 2000. The company secured the rights to use it in 2008 and has retained its legal hold on the trademark.

More painful for Apple maybe, IGB started selling its own iPhone smartphone model in December.

As a consolation for the Cupertino company, if you could call that, the agency ruled Apple can use the iPhone name for other products, such as clothing and jewelry, but not for smartphones.

Oracle Rejigs Google Suit

Aiming perhaps to recover some serious face it lost when a U.S. federal judge ruled against its copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, Oracle recently filed an appeal claiming that Java APIs are indeed copyrightable.

While admitting that Google’s Android mobile OS did not copy the code from actual Java functions, the database giant claims the world’s largest online search company used the “declaring code” from Java “declarations, headers, signatures, and names of functions.”

Now, nobody can and should blame Oracle for doing this courtroom somersault. After all, it did spend north of 7 billion dollars in acquiring Sun Microsystems, along with its Java patents and copyrights. Who are we then to fault Oracle for trying to at least recoup part of that huge bundle?

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