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Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s second-largest maker of wireless handsets, said it met a sales target for its most popular smartphone as the company seeks to narrow the gap with Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

Samsung sold 10 million units of the Galaxy S model in 2010 after introducing the device in June, the company said in an e-mailed statement today. The Suwon, South Korea-based phonemaker aims to double sales of smartphones this year as more customers use the device to make video calls, read electronic books and use social networking sites.

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Walk into any supermarket in the U.S. and it's easy to see that Americans have more choices in terms of products they can buy than most people in the world. But when it comes to choosing a cell phone, consumers in the U.S. are limited to a handful of devices offered by a few manufacturers, and those devices are sold solely through a single service provider. This means that Verizon Wireless subscribers are limited to phones sold specifically for the Verizon network. And Cingular Wireless subscribers are limited to handsets that Cingular sells. It also means that when subscribers switch from one service provider to another, they are unable to take their phones with them.

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A huge study from Denmark offers the latest reassurance that cell phones don't trigger cancer. Scientists tracked 420,000 Danish cell phone users, including 52,000 who had gabbed on the gadgets for 10 years or more, and some who started using them 21 years ago. They matched phone records to the famed Danish Cancer Registry that records every citizen who gets the disease and reported Tuesday that cell-phone callers are no more likely than anyone else to suffer a range of cancer types. The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the largest yet to find no bad news about the safety of cell phones and the radiofrequency energy they emit.

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Mercora's M works by giving subscribers access to their digital music library--only WMA, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formatted files--from any location via their phone. The software encodes and decodes all files to Ogg Vorbis, a low bit-rate format of near CD quality, before it reaches the earphones. Sounds cool, but forget about playing songs bought from Apple's iTunes Store--Apple uses a proprietary format called AAC, which Mercora M can't play. Music ripped from a CD to an iTunes library, though, is fair game, according to Avikk Ghose, Mercora's director of business development.