The latest in our series of monthly reviews of the mobile games industry in 2008.

October was a big month for advanced mobile gaming platforms, with hot news stories around iPhone, Android and N-Gage. Oh, and BlackBerry.

Perhaps the most controversial story of October was EA Mobile's no-punches-pulled critique of Nokia's N-Gage platform, which was all the more surprising for being delivered on-stage at Nokia's own Games Summit.

Things were going pretty well for the publisher though: it announced Q3 revenues of $47 million - up 24 per cent year-on-year. Interestingly, mobile was more lucrative during the quarter for EA than DS, PSP or Wii.

iPhone was part of that success, and Apple was announcing its own impressive stat - the fact that 200 million apps had been downloaded through its App Store for iPhone and iPod touch. As part of the same announcement, Apple revealed that 6.9 million iPhones had been sold in Q3.

Research In Motion got in on the act, announcing plans for its own BlackBerry application store, although it wouldn't launch until, ahem, March 2009. It promised an impressive 80 per cent revenue share for developers.

And then there was Android. The launch of the first Android handset, T-Mobile's G1, saw games quickly become popular on the Android Market. Glu's Brain Genius Deluxe and Bonsai Blast, and Namco Bandai's Pac-Man were the early pace-setters.

Glu Mobile didn't have such a great October, announcing that it was lowering its Q3 revenue and earnings expectations due to "lower consumer spending and slower growth in new mobile handset sales" in North America.

Capcom was in a more positive mood though, announcing that it had merged its North American and European mobile operations with the aim of making a bigger splash in both territories.

October was also the month that VeriSign sold its 49 per cent stake in Jamba to partner News Corporation for around $200 million. Crazy Frog was still bringing in the dollars then (well, or Schnuffel Bunny, by this point).

Elsewhere, O2 UK launched its 100% Mobile off-deck games portal, in partnership with Player X, and with reviews from a certain website called Pocket Gamer.

And if it's not too cheeky to have two Pocket Gamer stories in this roundup, October also saw the launch of Pocket Gamer France, bringing a little ooh la la to its mix of news, reviews and features.