BusinessWire:
According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, global smartphone shipments grew 54 percent annually to reach a record 155 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011. Apple reclaimed top position as the world’s number one smartphone vendor during the quarter.
paidContent:
In the first quarter that Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) was on board with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for an iPhone launch event, the company sold 4.2 million iPhones, accounting for more than half of the 7.7 million smartphones that its customers purchased in the fourth quarter. But that iPhone bounty came at a price, as Verizon’s earnings for the quarter were below analyst estimates on the high cost of iPhone subsidies.
NY Times:
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
Dan Benjamin for Hivelogic:
So when the alarm still goes off at 6am, I’ll realize I should have known that the mute switch won’t behave like every other mute switch I’ve used. All my other phones and devices mute and stay muted when I tell them to. But not the iPhone? This is how most people want the iPhone to work?
Wow, he makes a great point.
Ryan Kim at GigaOm:
The iPhone 4S, along with cheaper older models, has helped Apple close the distance on Google’s Android, drawing within a few percentage points in recent smartphone sales market share in the U.S., according to the NPD Group. In a CES telecom fact sheet, the research firm said that iOS has zoomed up to 43 percent of sales in October and November, compared with 26 percent in the third quarter. Meanwhile, Android’s share dropped from a high of 60 percent in the third quarter to 47 percent in October and November.
Make movies where you blow things up using only your iPhone. More fun that it sounds. A great app from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Interactive.
Baldwin wrote on Twitter Tuesday that he was “reamed” by a flight attendant for playing the game “Words with Friends” while the plane sat at a gate at Los Angeles International Airport.
As a result, The Washington Post reports that “According to AppData, over the last seven days, 200,000 people started playing the game on Facebook — 100,000 of them in the last day alone.”
Ellis Hamburger for Business Insider:
SkyDrive is cool because when you sign up, Microsoft gives you 25 GB of free storage to use as you please.
So that’s why it’s cool.
Mike Torres for the Windows Team Blog:
SkyDrive is your personal cloud for your documents, notes, photos and videos. Move your files into SkyDrive and immediately they’re available from any web browser anywhere in the world.
Here’s the iPhone part:
We realize that not everyone who relies on SkyDrive for sharing photos or accessing Office documents uses Windows Phone… yet. We have a long history of supporting iPhone customers with built-in support for Hotmail and with apps like Bing, Messenger, OneNote (with SkyDrive sync), and now Skype.
There’s a video of it in action, which I haven’t watched.
The Verge:
To date, the user tracking controversy surrounding Carrier IQ has focused primarily on Android, but today details are surfacing that the company also may have hooks into Apple’s iOS. Well-known iPhone hacker Chpwn tweeted today that versions at least as recent as iPhone OS 3.1.3 contained references to Carrier IQ and later confirmed it’s in all versions of iOS, including iOS 5.
Ars Technica: “Yes.”
Everybody is linking this today, and for good reason - this substantiates most of the theories we've been hearing for a while.
Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.999 inches diagonally. Apple will not just increase the size of the display and leave the current resolution, but will actually be adding pixels to the display. The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 x 1136. That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display. The screen will be the same 1.9632 inches wide, but will grow to 3.484 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.