Gartner has just released its Q1 figures for mobile handset sales, and the key takeaway is that Android continues to steal the show, led by handset maker Samsung. Google’s mobile platform now accounts for nearly 75% of all handset sales, a jump of almost 20 percentage points on a year ago, and equating to 156 million devices sold in the three-month period. Smartphones sales grew by 63 million units to 210 million for the quarter, making up nearly half of all mobile phone sales overall, at 425 million. With the number of mobile handset sales up by a mere 0.7% on a year ago, it’s clear that higher-end devices are very the much growth engine for the mobile industry at the moment.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the more interesting figures from Gartner.

Although Samsung does not release exact sales figures for its devices, Gartner estimates that the Korean giant is the biggest of them all: it accounted for almost 31% of all smartphones sold in the period, with Apple in number-two with 18%. It’s quite a change from last year, when the two were nearly level, with just 5 percentage points separating them. The widening gap, and Samsung’s growth, will continue into the quarter ahead, it seems, led by the popularity of the company’s newest flagship model. On the other hand, the fact remains that at least some appear to still be holding out for the next iPhone rather than going for the iPhone 5; and Apple meanwhile is still holding back from releasing new, low-cost models that might help it along more in emerging markets and compete more comprehensively against the huge range of Android devices out there.

With the proliferation of smartphones, we’re now able to use these mobile, mini computers to do just about everything we would do on our desktop while on the go. Yet, in spite of this evolution, mobile payments seems to be lagging behind. We use our phones to capture pictures and video, and share them instantaneously, but the average smartphone carrier is less comfortable with the idea of paying for a meal by swiping their phone. People want a mobile wallet, and it seems only a matter of time before someone gets it right, even if a winner has yet to emerge.

Part of the reason for the slower rate of adoption is the perception that mobile payments are insecure, rife with hidden fees and are the very opposite of seamless — or cross-platform. Akimbo launched its eponymous card in March to take on the increasing number of players in the mobile payments space each taking a slightly different tack, from Green Dot and NetSpend to LevelUp and Dwolla. In contrast, the Akimbo Card is designed to be an alternative to your walled-in virtual bank account, with a social and mobile spin.

Like LevelUp, Akimbo wants to stand out from the pack by offering a fee-free platform through which users can send and request money to any email address, Facebook friend or mobile phone. Simply put, it’s PayPal meets a Visa pre-paid card. In other words, Akimbo allows users to access transferred funds from ATMs and any location that accepts Visa debit cards. In an effort to target the some 10 million young people who use prepaid credit cards, Akimbo enables users to link and load the card with their bank accounts with cash or via direct deposit.

Google’s big annual developer conference kicks off on Wednesday, and while Android lead Sundar Pichai has downplayed big new announcements at Google I/O this year, we’ve also seen reports that suggest the Nexus line of Google-branded hardware won’t go completely untouched.

Nexus Phones

The rumors suggest that we won’t see a brand new Nexus phone at Google I/O this year, but what we could see instead is a mid-cycle upgrade for the Nexus 4. In fact, the existing version seems tailor-made for a couple quick internal hardware upgrades to inject some fresh life into sales and activate some new buzz around the product, which by most accounts has been selling fairly well, especially when compared to previous Nexus flagship phones.

What we’ve heard indicates that the Google Nexus 4 will appear at I/O boasting a 32GB internal memory upgrade, along with built-in LTE support. There’s an LTE-capable wireless radio built into the current Nexus 4, but it lacks a proper signal amplifier and as such remains officially disabled. Nearer the Nexus 4′s launch, you could activate it with a backdoor hack, but Google quickly shut that down.

Q: Why does a to do list application need $3.5 million in funding? A: Because it’s becoming more than a simple to do app. Today, Any.DO one of the more popular to do list applications for web and mobile, announced a seed round of funding led by existing investor Genesis Partners, with participation from both current and new investors Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt’s fund), Joe Lonsdale, Blumberg Capital, Joe Greenstein and others.

The company had previously announced $1 million in angel funding in late 2011 from Innovation Endeavors, Blumberg Capital, Genesis Partners, Palantir (Joe Lonsdale), Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut) and Brian Koo.

For those unfamiliar, Any.DO got its start on the Android platform after the success of the team’s first app, Taskos, which proved the market was ripe for such a concept. That app had grown to 1.3 million users by the time Any.DO arrived in November 2011, and today has more than doubled its install base.

E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of dollars” worth of Amazon Coins.

Coins, which were first announced in February, are the company’s move into an area that has been a strong way for app publishers to generate revenue through their apps. In that sense, the launch serves a two-fold purpose for Amazon: a way of encouraging developers to come to its platform (something Amazon has already been working on), and to spur more revenue generation.

A lot of the talk in virtual currency of late has been around the potential for bitcoin and other new monetary instruments fuelled by a network effect. But before bitcoin became the buzz, there were already a number of other virtual currency networks run by Facebook, Zynga and many more, with aim being to spend the “money” on gaming and other apps on their platforms.

Groupon is once again expanding its portfolio of mobile payment services, putting it in closer competition with the likes of Square and PayPal’s here targeting local merchants: today it has released Groupon POS, which appears to be an iPad-specific version of its mobile payments service aimed at local merchants, working as a dashboard to make and track payments.

This is the latest development in Groupon’s payments strategy and helps fill out founder and now-ex-CEO Andrew Mason’s strategy of Groupon becoming the “operating system for local commerce.” It shows that while Mason is now gone, the direction that he envisioned for how the company would diversify beyond daily deals remains.

It is also a sign of how the company is continuing to push mobile services. Last week, in its Q1 earnings report, Groupon noted that it had 41.7 million active users (meaning those that have purchased a Groupon offer in the last 12 months). In North America, still the company’s largest single market, some 45% of transactions were completed on mobile devices, up from 30% a year ago. In Q1, the company said that more than 7 million people downloaded Groupon mobile apps worldwide.