Call it a sort of a bear hug: Sprint, the also-ranniest of the also-rans in the carrier world, lost money selling phones that, on the aggregate gained them subscribers. It’s also Catch-22, a blindside, and a mess.

According to Sprint, the company reported a net loss last quarter while still selling 1.8 million iPhones and increasing their subscriber base by 1.6 million. How? The costs associated with provisioning and supporting these new phones drove operating losses to $438 million, up from $139 million in Q4 last year.

The company reported increased subscriber numbers – 55 million this year. Forty percent of Sprint iPhone buyers were new customers. They nearly doubled capital expenditures this year.

Sprint is in a strange place. Like T-Mobile, the company has always been overshadowed by the bigger guys and never gained traction after acquisition. While using ostensibly the same hardware, Verizon has roundly trounced Sprint by advertising improved coverage and reception.

However, unlike T-Mobile, Sprint has the iPhone. This move – beyond any network improvements or handset acquisitions – is what’s keeping the company afloat. The net loss shown this year happened because Sprint was supporting the iPhone, a wild situation in which a company’s best-seller is actually dragging it down.

If the iPhone taught consumes anything it’s that mobile broadband is a right, not a privilege. The right to Instagram, Yelp, and browse all day and night is seemingly god-given and that same god knows that the iPhone hasn’t been useful for making calls these last few years. In short, we’re looking at a product that would upend any carrier’s view of the world, not just Sprint’s.

For decades, carriers worried about getting calls from point A to point B. Now they have to worry about tethering, massive data downloads to small devices, and always-on connectivity. They have to worry about angry Tweets, upset Facebook posts, and maintain gear that is cutting edge and prone to failure. So, in the end, it didn’t make financial sense to go the popular route, but hopefully it will buoy Sprint’s prospects in the long term.

The iPhone taught carriers that it wasn’t enough to dump out a feature phone or two and keep the power on in the switch room. Sprint’s troubles – masquerading as opportunity – is the finest example of the change that is currently rolling over the operator landscape.

photo credit: ucumari via photopin cc

If you don’t know a resistor from a Mister Mister, this is the app for you. Built by Adafruit, creators of DIY Arduino gear, Circuit Playground is a $2.99 app designed to help you identify and understand various electronic components. For example, the app includes a resistor identification system based on the colored bands painted on the casing as well as a field guide to many electrical components.

The rest of the tools – including converters, calculators, and datasheet storage systems – just makes things a little bit easier when you’re building an electronics project. I’m terrible at this stuff so it would be a boon for me and my slow-witted monkey mind.

The app is available now for the iPhone and iPad.

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There has been much debate about what the post-PC era is, when it will arrive, or whether it’s already here. But key pieces of new data, emerging last week, are making the case that we crossed the imaginary line from the “PC” era to the “post-PC” era at the end of 2011. According to analysts at Canalys, two major computing milestones were achieved at the end of this year: smartphone shipments outpaced PCs for the first time ever, and Apple became the world’s largest PC maker, if you count iPads as PCs (as well you should).

Combined, what these numbers tell us is that the post-PC era is happening now. Right now. And maybe we need to think about how we define “PC.”

In Q4 2011, vendors shipped 158.5 million smartphones, up 57% on the 101.2 million units shipped in Q4 2010. For the year, there were 487.7 million units shipped, up 63% on the 299.7 million units shipped in 2010. Meanwhile, the global PC market grew just 15% in 2011 to 414.6 million units. The smartphones have won.

The funny thing about that PC shipments number is that, on its own, it doesn’t paint the most accurate picture of today’s PC landscape. There weren’t 414.6 million desktop, notebook and netbook computers shipped in 2011 – those were at 112.4 million, 209.6 million and 29.4 million, respectively. The 414.6 million number includes 63.2 million in “pad” shipments, Canalys’s preferred term for tablets. That means 15% of the “PC” shipments in 2011 were tablets, largely Apple’s iPad. In Q4, tablets were 22% of the total PC shipments. And the tablet segment of the market grew 274.2% year-over-year.

Also in Q4 2011, Apple became the leading worldwide “PC” vendor (if you count the iPad as a PC) with 15 million iPads and 5 million Macs shipped, representing 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped in Q4. It overtook HP (now #2), Acer, Dell and Lenovo in the process.

Overall, the PC market grew 16% year-over-year, Canalys noted last month. Without tablets, it declined 0.4%.

Of course, there’s still the question of whether or not tablets should be broken out into their own computing category, positioned against the traditional “PCs” when tracking device shipments. For what’s it worth, I think it’s fine to count tablets as PCs – after all, PC means “personal computer,” not “machine running Windows.” The fact that we still equate the word with a desktop, monitor, keyboard and mouse combo is a testament to the empire Microsoft built, and is now losing.

Case in point: netbook shipments dropped 25.3% from 2010 to 2011. Desktops grew a paltry 2.3% and notebooks grew just 7.5%. This is end of the “PC” era in action. While the 209.6 million notebook shipments still make that the largest category of “PCs,” the growth trends here, if sustained, dictate that’s its only a matter of time before the shift to tablets becomes even more pronounced.

Think about it: what’s the first “PC” you’re going to buy for your kid, as a new member to the post-PC computing generation? If you respond “notebook,” I’d say you’re lying. That kid is getting an iPad, even if they end up stealing yours. If not an iPad, then they’re getting a phone.

And smartphones are PCs, too. The most affordable ones.

This past quarter, smartphone shipments overtook PCs, a hugely important milestone that speaks volumes about the state of modern-day computing. The computer-in-your-pocket has moved from being “a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition,” explains Canalys of the change.

In Q4, Apple broke records by shipping 37 million iPhones – the most ever shipped by a single vendor in a quarter. Previously, Nokia held the record with 28.3 million phones shipped in Q4 2010. What a difference a year makes.

But Canalys cautioned that it expects to see smartphone market growth slow in 2012, as vendors exercise “greater cost control and discipline” to focus on profitability. This is the only discordant note to the report. Smartphone growth slowing? No offense to the analysts, but I’ll believe that one when I see it. Just watching Apple’s sales alone, it’s clear you can’t underestimate its power to deliver record-breaking numbers. In addition, just because vendors like HTC and Motorola are going to launch fewer smartphone models in 2012, that doesn’t (necessarily) mean they’ll sell fewer overall phones. If anything, the companies are hoping that their increased focus on “hero” devices will help them increase sales.

One thing is clear, however: that post-PC era everyone’s been talking about since the day the phrase slipped off Steve Jobs’ lips has arrived. We’re living it. Anyone who wastes their time debating its existence (tablets are PCs! phones are PCs!) is arguing semantics. The shift itself, whatever you want to call it, is happening.

So perhaps “post-PC” isn’t the best terminology. If everything’s a PC, then maybe what we’ve achieved is something more akin to “PCs Everywhere.” Not as catchy, though.

Photo credit top: Lokesh Dhakar, flickr; bottom: agirregabiria, flickr

According to new research from the NPD Group, Apple passed LG and Samsung to become the top-selling U.S. handset brand in Q4 2011. Combined, the three available models of the iPhone (iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS) accounted for 43% of the U.S. smartphone market.

Android, however, continued to see larger market share at 48%.

Together, iPhone and Android accounted for over 90% of U.S. smartphone sales, leaving little room for any up-and-comer like Windows Phone, or even the declining brand that is RIM’s BlackBerry.

Android’s market share may continue to grow, too, given that more first-time smartphone buyers were choosing Android over iPhone this past quarter, the firm found. Based on NPD Group’s monthly Smartphone Track service, 57% of first-time smartphone buyers went with an Android device compared with just 34% who purchased iPhones.

NPD suggests that the reason for these consumers’ Android preference has to do more with availability – Android has “wide carrier support,” the report says. Also helpful is Android’s large app selection and its support of LTE at Verizon.

The overall portion of handset sales that were smartphones also climbed in Q4 2011, now accounting for 68% of the total U.S. phone market. That’s an increase of 18% from Q2 2010, said NPD. The average cost per smartphone, however, hasn’t seen as much movement, down from $149 in Q4 2010 to $143 in Q4 2011.

Not surprisingly, Apple’s record-breaking quarter (its fiscal Q1, running September 25-December 31), led to the iPhone 4S coming out on top as the best-selling handset in Q4. It also earned the top three slots among the top five handsets for the time period:

1. Apple iPhone 4S
2. Apple iPhone 4
3. Apple iPhone 3GS
4. Samsung Galaxy S II
5. Samsung Galaxy S 4G

Ross Rubin, executive director, Connected Intelligence for The NPD Group, said that consumers were attracted to the iPhone 4S’s ”faster processor, improved camera and the Siri speech-driven agent.”

“The iPhone 4S outsold the iPhone 4 by 75%, and outsold the iPhone 3GS, available for free on AT&T, five to one,” Rubin noted.

Yesterday, Gizmodo ran a story about a supposed bug in iOS, specifically related to iMessage. The title: The Apple Bug That Let Us Spy on a Total Stranger’s iPhone. Essentially, Gizmodo got ahold of an iPhone that was receiving iMessages not intended for that phone. The fact that some of these messages were quasi-sexual in nature and that the phone belonged to a teenage boy made the story more salacious. But here’s the thing, fear mongering aside, this “bug” is something that is so convoluted that it’s almost not worth even addressing. Almost.

Here’s what happened: a kid was having trouble with his iPhone. His mother took that iPhone to an Apple Store. When there, an Apple Store employee screwed up. Rather than following protocol and using a test SIM to debug the phone (Apple has test SIMs in their stores for this exact purpose), he oddly used his own SIM. This essentially turned the kid’s phone into the retail employee’s phone. The employee probably thought this was fine since it would only be temporary while he fixed the phone. The problem — which one has to assume he didn’t realize — is that even after you take the SIM out of the phone, the pairing leaves behind an imprint of that SIM. In this case, the iMessage account.

iMessage has made a lot of headlines in the past few months as it’s Apple’s brilliant way of helping to destroy the rip-off that is SMS. One key element of iMessage is the ability to pin an Apple account to the service alongside your phone number. This needs to happen in order for users to take full advantage of iMessage. Because of this connection, Apple can automatically figure out whether to use standard SMS or iMessage within the iMessages app. And iMessages has a bonus: the ability to work with many devices at once, ensuring your messages stay in sync.

These upsides — trying to make something that’s somewhat complicated as user-friendly as possible — lead to a downside like this. If you happen to be swapping SIM cards, you might transfer your iMessage credentials over to this other phone. But let’s be honest, how many people are going to do that? In the U.S., most people have no idea what a SIM card even is. And if they do, it doesn’t matter since most iPhones are locked. In other countries, SIMs are obviously popular, but this issue would involve you swapping SIMs with someone with an unlocked phone (and not wanting to set up your own iMessages account when you swap back).

But none of that is even what happened here. In this case, an Apple retail employee simply made a mistake. Reached for comment, an Apple spokesperson acknowledged this:

“This was an extremely rare situation that occurred when a retail employee did not follow the correct service procedure and used their personal SIM to help a customer who did not have a working SIM. This resulted in a temporary situation that has since been resolved by the employee.”

The bigger issue here is if your phone is stolen. Ars Technica actually addressed this about a month ago. This is still an edge case (as the vast majority of phones aren’t stolen), but Apple should come up with a way to remotely disable iMessages on a per-device basis. The way to do it right now seems to be to disable your Apple account, which is unfortunate (see: update). Of course, having your phone stolen in the first place is unfortunate. And unless it’s remote-wiped immediately (which rarely happens), any crook can get access to things likely much worse than your iMessages. This is a downside of life and scumbags.

Speaking of scumbags, it sure was nice of Gizmodo to run several of this Apple retail employee’s private messages and images along with the name that everyone knows him by. Part two of this story will probably involve kidnapping him, locking him in a basement, and liveblogging his emails — which were not secured because Apple doesn’t have a security feature to auto-lock and wipe phones when someone is hit over the head by a two-by-four.

Update: Apple has pointed out the following things that can be done if your device is stolen to ensure the problems above don’t occur:

Remote Wipe and then call your carrier/de-activate your SIM (de-register must be within 24 hours after Remote Wipe)

or

Activate a replacement phone with a replacement SIM using your same phone number

or

Change your Apple ID password (only works if you use an Apple ID with iMessage)

[photo: flickr/anonymous9000]

So you want to take a photo of you and your buds on the slopes or at the bar or at A&F or whatever and you know, just know you’re going drop that shnitz on the floor. So what do you need? A freakin’ Kevlar cord, Mr. Brojangles. That’s what you need.

So this is the Kenu Highline. It’s basically a locking connector, a coiled cable, and a little loop. You lock your iPhone to the cable, attach the loop to your jacket, and go totally nuts. Attach it to anything. Your jacket. Your bropurse. Your 7 Jeans with the big, tribal stitching. Anything, Brosephus, but they clearly want to grab the snow sports folks because the entire website is dedicated to shreddin’, ski-liftin’, and hittin’ the apres ski brodeo.

It’s only $20, so it’s not that expensive and if it saves you chipping your phone on the floor of the ski lodge while you and your broposse roll up to the bar for some Coors then that’s like money in the bank, brosephine, money in the bank.

Product Page

AT&T this morning released its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011. Consolidated revenues clocked in at $32.5 billion, up 3.6 percent compared to the year-earlier quarter. They recorded a huge net loss for Q4 2011: $6.7 billion, or $1.12 per diluted share.

Zooming in on smartphone sales, it’s worth noting that AT&T delivered its best-ever quarter to date, hands down.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the company says it sold 9.4 million smartphones, nearly double the number sold in the third quarter and 50 percent more than the previous quarterly record.

This also led to 19.4 percent growth in wireless data revenues, the company said.

During the quarter, more than 7.6 million iPhones were activated, the “majority of which” were iPhone 4S, and AT&T says more than twice as many Android smartphones were sold last quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. AT&T also said it sold 311,000 tablets in Q4 2011.

In August, I remember seeing YouTube links for the band One Like Son, who recorded an entire song using only their iPhones and a few iPhone peripherals (in addition to their instruments and drum programs). Today, I received a press release indicating that the band have finished recording an entire 10 song album using the same setup.

Intrigued, I contacted Stephen Poff, the mastermind behind the record, to get a few more details about the impetus and methods behind the project.

The 10 song record was an intentional project by Mr. Poff that started on January 1, 2011 and was recorded, mixed and mastered right up until December 31, 2011. So it took a full year to complete this side project, amidst an undoubtably busy day job as a videographer/photographer at the agency LWT in Montgomery AL.

As a former “four-tracker” myself, I have to say the results are surprisingly good. Poff clearly has a flair for writing pop punk/rock songs and he and his remote bandmates are adept at using some of the audio tools we have reviewed here at TechCrunch.

Here is an example from the new release so you can hear the quality – Glory Days by One Like Son

Remote bandmates? It was interesting to hear that Poff and fellow musicians Bill Rester (Bass and Backing Vocals), Perry Brown (Backing Vocals), and Bryan Segraves (Piano/Organ) crafted these songs together in different locations using Dropbox as their repository for adding their parts. Apparently, Poff would lay a MIDI drum part, guitar riff and main vocal line, then upload the file to Dropbox where his bandmates would download, add their parts and then put the files back into Dropbox.

The main technology the group used in the recording process, other than iPhones included:
GuitarJack, AmpKit and the AmpKit LiNK, FourTrack, Multitrack DAW, Pocket Organ, ThumbJam, the Moog Filtatron and GarageBand.

One Like Son are not the first band ever to do this (see The Gorillaz and The Ultramods—both using iPads), but they may be one of the first groups from more of the “Pop/Rock ‘n Roll” tradition to attempt recording this way. I would estimate that tracking analog riffs this way could present many different challenges than music styles rooted purely in synth pop, mashup, or minimalism. So props for this effort!

An iPhone case from Nissan? As you can imagine, it would make no sense for the automaker to develop an ordinary case, and the so-called Nissan Scratch Shield iPhone Case is actually special. According to the company, it’s the world’s first “self-healing” iPhone cover: in other words, it quickly fixes (fine) scratches by itself.

Nissan says they used their self-healing paint finish originally developed for vehicles for the case, which is made from light weight ABS plastic. Scratch Shield as a paint technology has been used in various Nissan cars since 2005, before Nissan teamed up with the University of Tokyo and Japan-based Advanced Softmaterials [JP] to create the case.

Nissan explains:

The outer ‘paint’ is made from polyrotaxane, which means that when damage occurs to the coating in the form of a fine scratch, the chemical structure is able to react to change back to its original shape and fill the gap – ‘healing’ the blemish.

The company distributed a number of prototype iPhone cases to journalists and “customers” and might commercialize the product later this year. Mobile carrier Docomo is already offering the NEC N-03B, a feature phone using Scratch Shield, on the Japanese market.

Via Penn Olson

Apple has built a search engine for apps. It’s called iCloud – or more technically, it’s one aspect of the overall iCloud service. Using it, you can search through every app you have installed on your iOS device or have ever purchased in the past. And it’s available on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch right now.

The average smartphone user has 64 mobile apps installed on their mobile device. I’m ahead of the curve. I have around 400. It’s pushing nearly 7 GB of storage. Granted, many of these apps were installed for testing purposes only – they aren’t used daily by any means. But my real problem is that I’m not inclined to remove apps I don’t use. They just sit there on the phone, abandoned, languishing on the back screens. I could delete them, but I don’t. You know…just in case.

But the promise of iCloud, as I see it, is that these apps can disappear from the iPhone’s homescreen, but never have to fully disappear from reach. They can be recalled through a simple search.

Note to Android users: This whole post is about Apple’s iCloud. Android has cool ideas, too. I love my Nexus S. But Android is not being addressed in today’s article. 

That search mechanism already exists. For now, it’s tucked away under a couple of screens within the iPhone’s App Store app. It’s neither an everyday necessity for the average user or functional enough for a power user’s needs. But it’s there, and somewhere at Apple HQ, it’s being improved.

Today, it’s easier to flip through your screens to find your apps, especially if you only have 64 of them (or less). Worst case scenario: you can’t remember which folder you tucked the app in, so you flip to the left side of the homescreen and use Spotlight Search to find the app in question instead.

But let’s extrapolate out to a few years into the future. A few years of downloading and abandoning apps on our backscreens. A few years of iPhone upgrades, with hundreds of leftover apps syncing to new devices. Why not delete the unused apps? Why not perform regular app cleanups? Because users are lazy. I’m lazy. I don’t want to. I have better things to do. So does everyone. And so the apps continue to sync from one device to the next, forgotten.

We need a new metaphor for search. Homescreens, app folders and Spotlight Search will not be enough. We need a cloud-hosted index of searchable apps.

A number of companies are working towards this end. (See: Chomp, Quixey, Do@t, Xyologic, Appolocious, AppsFire, Kinetik, and Crosswa.lk, for example). There are a lot baby steps being taken here, and the occasional leap. Build a search engine like Google, but for apps! Include rankings and user reviews! Use keywords from app descriptions! Make it social! All good ideas. But not enough.

And anyone who’s just building an app search engine app without some other larger business behind it, could easily get trounced on by Apple in the coming months.

To see what I mean, check out the bare-bones iCloud app search engine that’s on your iOS device right now (assuming you’re on the latest version of iOS):

1. Launch the App Store app.
2. Tap “Updates.”
3. Tap “Purchased” (at the top).
4. Drag the screen down so you can see the search box.
5. Enter in a keyword (try something common, e.g. “photo.”).
6. Tap “Search.”

Look at your results. There, all your apps matching your keywords. Ranked by – how? – I’m not 100% sure, but it looks like time of installation. It’s certainly not update date or alphabetically.

This iCloud app search engine is only partial functional, though. Like Spotlight, it only looks at the app’s titles, not descriptions, for keywords. It doesn’t know how much you’ve used an app or how you’ve rated it. Sometimes, it would show me which apps were installed versus which are available on the cloud. Sometimes it got buggy and showed all apps as having the iCloud download button, even if they were installed on the device.

But it’s there. And it’s only a matter of time before iCloud search is integrated with Spotlight Search and Siri, via APIs. We’ll soon be calling up our preferred apps using natural language, both in typed-in queries and in spoken ones. We won’t need to know whether the app is currently on our phone. iCloud will know. Siri will know. We may not even need to initiate the download ourselves. Our phone will do that for us.

In addition, our homescreen clutter will be gone. Apps will delete themselves after periods of non-use unless you configure them as “locked.” Maybe there will be an “auto organize” option for our homescreens, which arranges apps based on usage.

With the exponential growth of the mobile application ecosystem, this is one of the only possible ways to manage the entirety of a user’s app archive in the months ahead. Many of today’s apps are cloud-enabled, but this will be a cloud-enabled phone.

Maybe I’m dreaming? But if Apple can’t get it done, someone should. (Android? Windows Phone? An app developer? A startup?) The mobile ecosystem is still young enough to be entirely disrupted by someone with a new idea for parsing the new web of apps. Today, I believe it’s Apple that’s the closest to implementation, given the glimpse it’s given us with iCloud. But who knows? We could still be surprised.

“Hey, can I see your phone real quick?”

Oh, crap. What tabs did you leave open in Safari? Did you delete those photos (you know, those photos. The ones you promised her you’d delete?) That My Little Pony app that you totally-installed-just-to-test-your-download-speed-seriously-shut-up… is it still there?

Quick, hand it over before you pique their curiosity! Or say “no” and be the weirdo who wouldn’t hand their phone over to a friend for a second. If only there were some sort of on-the-fly middle ground — a “Guest Mode”, if you will.

As smartphones march toward ubiquity, so does the trend of passing them around between friends. Meanwhile, we cram (and then forget all about) more and more private junk into our phones each and every day. All the photos? All the voicemails? All the the still-logged-in social network accounts? I don’t even keep anything remotely salacious on my phone, and I’m still terrified that I’m handing over album after album of booty pictures I never even actually took anytime I pass off my phone.

Here’s the dream: one lock-screen, two PINs. One for me, one for anyone else who might use my phone but doesn’t necessarily need to see everything.

You see, I don’t mind if my friends want to challenge my ridiculous Fruit Ninja skills. They want to boot up Google Maps and be the Chewbacca (read: co-pilot) to my Millenium Falcon (read: Honda)? Great. They need to look something up and their 90′s brick phone can’t handle such techno-voodoo? Here, use mine! I trust them not to run off with my phone — they are my friends, after all.

That doesn’t mean I want them to be a tap or two away from everything.

Thus, the two PINs. Punch in your private PIN, your phone unlocks as normal. Punch in the guest PIN, it hides anything that prying eyes may sneak (or accidentally stumble) into. Your browsing history gets hidden, and all but a hand-picked, whitelisted set of apps completely disappear. Unlike a simple one-tap “Guest Mode” button, however, people you don’t want using your phone at all (like, say, dirty, dirty phone thieves) still can’t.

Things of a distantly similar vein have been built for Android — those I’ve seen, however, are all simply single-purpose apps (like games or activities for kids) that can’t be exited without a password. I’ve yet to see anything implemented system-wide. Why? Get on it, Apple. Or Google. Or Microsoft. Hell, everyone do it.

Update: Hah! Looks like I’m not the only one who wants this.

Apple this morning announced that its massively popular smartphone, the iPhone 4S, will be available in China and 21 additional countries on Friday, January 13.

According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, that means the iPhone 4S will shortly be available in a total of 90 countries.

It also means the phone will indeed launch in China before the Chinese New Year (January 23), which is sort of the equivalent of Black Friday in the United States.

Put differently: ka-ching.

From the official press release:

Beginning Friday, January 13, iPhone 4S will be available in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Cameroon, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, China, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Grenada, Guam, Guinea Conakry, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos and Uganda.

Also read:

Apple, China Mobile In Talks To Bring The iPhone To Its 600m Users

Apple’s Terrific And Tumultuous 2011

Who’s browsing the mobile web the most? Apparently, iPhone and iPad owners are. According to end-of-the-month data from statistics provider NetMarketShare, iOS users ended up with a 52% market share of mobile web browsing in December 2011. More simply put, that means that over half of the mobile web browsing last month took place on an iOS device.

Android, meanwhile, had a 16.2% share, behind Java ME at 21.27%, which fell into second place.

Trailing the top three were Symbian (5.76%), BlackBerry (3.51%) and the mysterious “Other” (1.07%) which is where Windows Phone must be hiding.

iOS saw the highest numbers in October, when it reached 61.5%, but has fallen slightly since.

Of course, it may not be fair to compare iOS directly with the other mobile platforms, given that the iPad accounts for a good bit of Apple’s market share in this slice of mobile data. But even when the iPad is excluded, the iPhone still holds its own with a 25.24% showing. The iPad is at 24.53% and the iPod Touch accounts for 2.32%.

Android, when divvied up by versions, sees 8.92% for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and 4.10% for Android 2.2% (Froyo). Where are the newer versions? Barely there: Android 3.x is just a little over a 1% share and Android 4.x is a tiny 0.05%.

This data may seem a little odd, given Android’s marketshare gains, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, so it could be a reflection on the service’s methodology. But NetMarketShare is fairly reliable, so it could also be a reflection of the varying habits of iOS and Android users in general.

Hat tip: MobileMarketingWatch 

This is the first Christmas where I didn’t get a single gift. Because I had to take care of a bunch of logistics issues, I decided not to celebrate “the holidays” this year, and you know what? It was awesome.

It’s amazing not having any expectations about what you’re going to get, give and whatnot. Also, for some reason I got tons of digital messages of gratitude in lieu of material gifts, and I absolutely adore all the people who reached out to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ adore.

There is a darker side of the blatantly consumerist holiday (why are people being killed on Black Friday? WHY?), and comedy writer Jon Hendren (@Fart) managed to perfectly capture everything that is wrong with Christmas by searching for tweets that were particularly spoiled, like “I swear, everybody got an iPhone 4S. I asked for one and I didn’t get it. Santa, I hate you” and “My parents are the worst mother Fucking parents in the world fuck you mom and dad for not getting me a Iphone. FUCK YOU. FML,” and then retweeting them.

This simple action resonated with the webosphere, so much so that Internet bard Jonathan Mann turned Hendren’s retweets into a song (above) within a 48 hour turnover.

To compile material for his impromptu performance art, Hendren used Twitter search strings like: ”not getting,” “iPhone” and “iPod” or “iPad” or “Car” which would return tweets for people unhappy about “not getting.” “You can do the same thing with ‘didn’t get’ or ‘where’s my’ as well,” he says.

So what possessed this sort of ad hoc social commentary on people unhappy because of  the lack of iProducts under the tree? (Amazing in light of the 1.4 billion people who don’t have clean drinking water, right?)

“I was visiting with my family,” says Hendren on the impetus behind his critique. “They’d all gone to bed somewhat early on Christmas Eve night, and I was lying awake playing with Twitter’s search function on my iPhone (oddly enough). Nobody I was following was tweeting much of anything at that time, so I didn’t feel too bad about flooding my timeline. I think I did about 40 or 50 before people started posting fake tweets, which made it harder to find real ones among the search results, so I cut it off probably around Noon on Christmas morning. There are probably even better real ones among all the fake ones out there by now, but it’s too hard to tell.”

Hendren currently writes part-time for Something Awful as a day job and got laid off three weeks ago from his full time job due to “restructuring.” For the record, I am really really upset that no one bought me a house this Christmas. Okay, not. Well, maybe a little.

Amazon has updated the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad, adding some basic improvements to the standard assortment of reader functions. These include the addition of “print replica” textbooks so students can follow along with the paper copy in class as well as improved PDF support and a personal document system that lets you send files to an Amazon address for conversion.

They’ve also improved the magazine interface for easy downloads and storage. You can also sideload PDFs for reading on the go.

As if that weren’t enough, Conan O’Brien brings us someone who may or may not be Jeff Bezos addressing the many complaints folks have had regarding the Kindle Fire, including the poorly-place on/off button and its as-of-yet undiscovered tendency to catch fire.

For the first time, the Facebook for Android mobile app has eclipsed the daily active user count of Facebook for iPhone. The Android app launched in September 2009 more than a year after its iPhone sister and has been playing catch-up ever since. Both are developed internally by Facebook. This week the two were briefly tied, but the Android app is now pulling away with 58.3 million DAU compared to the iPhone app’s 57.4 million, according to the AppData tracking service.

With the Android device base growing at 550,000 activations per day and Timeline now available for Android but not yet for iPhone, I expect this gap to widen. [Update: Facebook released Facebook for iPhone 4.1 that supports Timeline access on December 18th.]

Facebook for Android‘s monthly user count of 85.4 million still lags behind the iPhone app’s 99.1 million MAU. However, this stat isn’t as important as DAU, or stickiness — the percentage of monthly active users that return daily. Android’s stickiness is 68.2%, compaed to iPhone’s 57.9%. This could indicate that Android devices appeal to a younger, more Facebook-engaged audience, or to more hardcore technology users in general. The iPhone’s role as a fashion and status symbol may be drawing less engaged users.

Another explanation for the Android app taking the lead is that Facebook released an official iPad app in October which now has 5.5 million DAU. Though many users likely switched from using the unoptimized iPhone app on their iPad, some probably came from unofficial third-party apps.

Until Facebook for iPhone is updated to support Timeline (which it was on Dec. 18th), some of the app’s users some may stray to the HTML5 mobile site and slow the app’s growth. Meanwhile, Facebook for Android 1.8.1′s ability to access Timeline can help the app grow its lead. For reference, Facebook for BlackBerry has 29.9 million DAU, and Facebook for Windows Phone has 360,000 DAU according to AppData.

User counts of the Facebook apps matter because they can influence where Facebook devotes mobile development resources. For years, features were first released for the iPhone version, possibly because its higher user count made it more of a priority. If the Android app becomes significantly more popular, Timeline might be the first of many features it gets early. [Update: This could set an example for other companies to develop for Android first as well.] And that could sway people choosing what phone to buy.

This is a coming of age moment for Android.

If you are a “female” you apparently choose clothing in the form of “outfits,” a sort of ritualized selection process that allows you to look “good” in a different set of clothes each day. While I subscribe to Thoreau’s maxim – “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and, incidentally, when your neighbors come over to your place on Walden and catch a whiff of you, you’ll be even more alone” – it is my understanding that some “ladies” like to change their “clothes” daily and they often need help facilitating this process.

But what is a lady to do if she cannot remember what outfits she has worn in the past month? Cry? Yell at the barista? No. She uses Cloth.

Cloth is an iOS app that lets you store outfits. You can make multiple outfit folders for different events (weddings, work, mall openings), ensuring you never wear the same outfit twice. You can also create ensembles based on various themes, including Holiday, Blood-letting, and Book Signing.

You can share outfits with friends or send your outfits to the main Cloth site so the entire world can see how you look (which, I suspect, is the real point here, let’s be honest). The app also includes badges and awards for sharing your outfits.

It’s available now and costs $1.99. But, as they say on the TV, you’re worth it.

Former TC writer Seth Porges created the app with his model/fashionista/technologist girlfriend Wray Serna. Both Porges and Serna are very well-dressed so I can only assume this will help you be like them. Considering my “outfit” today consists of shorts, flip-flops, and a Goonies baseball jersey, I suspect I could use their assistance.

WowWee, not content with creating singing Elvis heads, is branching out into AppGear Appcessories – apps that require AR-based accessories, allowing you to interact with real environments using an iPhone or iPod Touch. These games, arriving in stores in April, include a zombie game where you’re the zombies fighting off upset homeowners (What a twist!) and an air battle game that actually uses tiny foam planes attached to the front of your phone to simulate flying in three-dimensional space.

The games will cost $9.99 and include various collectable parts. For example, the zombie game, Zombie Burbz, includes four collectable figurines. Of of the figurines has a set of conductive pads on the bottom and, using the iPad’s multi-touch screen, you control the action by moving the figurine across the virtual board.

All of these concepts are quite cute. Mixing AR and gaming is a tough sell but I think WowWee has gotten it mostly right. One game, for, example, allows you to build a ray gun in real life and mix and match parts, resulting in odd weapons that do different things inside the game. It’s an interesting way to connect collectables with games.

Will it succeed? Meh. Kids are notoriously fickle and these sorts of things require an investment of time and effort that many casual gamers might now have. Why install a foam airplane when you can just fire up Angry Birds. That said, it’s a start and it can only get better. And the zombie game, in which the zombies eat garbage instead of brains, is pretty funny.
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You have to hand it to Google. They know that I prefer Apple products and have been generally critical of many Google moves in the past couple of years. And yet, they’re unafraid to give me their newest products to test out. To be honest, I’m not sure Apple would do the same. But I think this is a smart move on Google’s part. On one hand, they may get a negative review but they know that many will discount the negativity coming from me. On the flip side, if it’s positive: gravy train time.

Thus: my thoughts on the Galaxy Nexus. But before I begin…

Rather than do a full-on review — you’ve probably already seen plenty of those — and given that I now write an Apple-centric column for TechCrunch, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to continue my “An iPhone Lover’s Take…” series. For some background, here are my previous stories from the same angle on the Nexus One, the HTC EVO 4G, the Nexus S, a Windows Phone, and even the iPhone 4.

My colleague Jason Kincaid took a similar approach for a post a few weeks back, but did it from a slightly different angle — call it: An Original iPhone Lover Who Learned To Love Android Until Switching Back To The iPhone… Reviews The Galaxy Nexus. Oddly, he just had just switched back to the iPhone after years of Android use — but he says the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich in particular may get him to switch back yet again. Meanwhile, GigaOm’s Darrell Etherington also looked at the Galaxy Nexus from an iPhone user’s perspective and ultimately decided the iPhone 4S was still the device for him. So I’m here to break the tie.

I’ve been using an iPhone since the day the first one launched in 2007. It is without question my favorite and most-used gadget of all time. Over that same span, I’ve tried about a dozen different Android devices ranging from the G1 to the Nexus S — the results have been decidedly mixed. I pretty much hated the G1, generally liked the Nexus One, thought the EVO 4G was more or less crap, and basically enjoyed the Nexus S. But none, in my mind, could touch the iPhone.

So what about the Galaxy Nexus?

I was given the device shortly before I took off for Europe a couple weeks ago. Given that it’s unlocked and I got a 3G SIM, I’ve been using it a lot — just as much as I’ve used any of the other Android devices listed above. For a few nights, it has been my primary device when I’ve been out and about. Unfortunately, I have not been able to test any sort of 4G network with it, so consider all of this a Galaxy Nexus 3G review.

First and foremost, the Galaxy Nexus is way too big. The 4.65-inch screen is nice when I’m sitting on my couch, but out and about it feels like I’m Zack Morris holding his Gordon Gekko phone. I’d consider myself to have average sized hands for an adult male, and the screen is so large that it killed several one-handed operations for me (especially since many Android apps use a top nav system). I’ll admit that for some apps, like Gmail, having a screen larger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch variety is very nice. But 4.3-inch may be better. This is just too big.

While the screen is too big, I am happy that Google has finally decided to get rid of hardware menu buttons and go all-in on the screen. Previous Android hardware was always made worse by the decision to include fixed nav buttons along the button. With Ice Cream Sandwich, all these buttons can now be software-based. There isn’t even a home hardware button like the iPhone has anymore — it’s all software.

I like this. The iPhone home button wears down over time and it makes noise when you click it. (Of course, the Galaxy Nexus still has a wake/power button of the right side.) I hope Apple does something more inventive with the button if they choose to keep it in future iPhone hardware iterations. Perhaps a multi-touch top on the button that allows you to swipe between open iOS apps would make the continuation of the physical button worth it.

I also like the inclusion of an indicator light on the Galaxy Nexus. Both the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone have options to vibrate or give you audio cues to alert you to new messages, but if the phone isn’t on me, I often miss those. The light allows you to see if you have new message waiting without having to turn the screen on. This is one of the few things BlackBerry got right that Apple for whatever reason hasn’t bothered to mimic.

The rest of the Galaxy Nexus hardware leaves something to be desired. The iPhone feels like a completely and thoughtfully designed object. By comparison, the Galaxy Nexus still feels rather cheap and plastic-y. It’s not awful, but you’d think Samsung could do better at this point. Some people will like having the option to remove to the back to get at the battery, but the method for doing so remains a joke. You essentially have to rip it off. I feel like I’m peeling a nail away from a finger every time I do it — it’s that unpleasant.

The battery life itself on the device is very good. I felt like the Galaxy Nexus was lasting at least as long as the iPhone 4S on a fully charged battery, perhaps even a bit longer if some cases. Again, I didn’t try it on a 4G network, which is known to drain battery quicker. (I also haven’t had the battery discharge issues that some iPhone 4S users have been reporting since the launch.) But fear not, this is not the EVO with its temper-melting 30-minute battery.

The camera on the Galaxy Nexus is definitely worse than the iPhone 4S, both in megapixels (8 vs. 5), and in image quality. But the iPhone 4S is also a ridiculously good camera. The Galaxy Nexus is still a fine point-and-shoot replacement, in my opinion. The camera seems better than any other Android device I’ve used. One nit is that while there is a method to go right into the camera from the lock screen (just like iOS 5 has), it’s too slow if the camera isn’t previously running. You’ll hit the camera button and watch as the Android main screen loads and then the camera apps loads. This feels like more of a macro than a feature.

And let’s talk about Ice Cream Sandwich. The artist also known as Android 4.0 is very solid. There is no question that the software is much improved over previous iterations in terms of speed, but mainly usability. I really like things like the multi-task tray and some of the new widgets.

Unfortunately, the system still lacks much of the fine polish that iOS users enjoy. The majority of Android users will probably think such criticism is bullshit, but that has always been the case. I imagine it’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better when both machines get them from point A to point B. As a Honda owner myself, I’m not sure I would buy it — I’d have to experience it to understand it, I imagine. And most Android lovers are not going to spend enough time with iOS to fully appreciate the differences.

Still, if the Android team ever wants to convert (or at least convince) most iOS users, they still have quite a bit of work to do here. Then again, they probably don’t (or shouldn’t) care too much about converting iOS users over to Android. All the non-smartphone users out there remain the much bigger prize to go after (for both Google and Apple).

Other things that will sound like nits but drove me crazy with ICS included the constant focusing on text fields only to have to click again to get the keyboard to pop up. If I’m in a text field, I clearly want to type something. Why should I have to click again? This doesn’t always happen, but it happens a lot — particularly in third-party apps.

Another: why is there a separate app for Messaging and Google+ Messenger? Apple baked iMessage into their SMS app, why didn’t Google? If they’re worried about anti-competitive concerns, why would they bundle all the Google+ stuff into ICS to begin with? Similarly, why do Gmail and Email continue to be two separate apps? And why on Earth is the web browser not Chrome yet!?

The new People app social unification is nice — I love the big pictures. But my god Google needs help with their duplication/merging detection. One of my friends has four separate entries — one for his phone number, one for his Gmail/Google+, one for Twitter, and one for another email. Several others had three different entries. Most had at least two. Also, Google provides an option to link your Facebook account in Accounts & sync, but it does nothing. I’m sure this is due to the Google/Facebook fracas, but why include something in your OS that is completely broken?

Ice Cream Sandwich’s voice command functionality is a joke compared to Siri — but that may be changing soon, we’ll see.

In his write-up, Jason noted that iOS is still far behind Android when it comes to notifications, I have to disagree. I find Android’s notification tray to be far less useful than it is on iOS. For example, if I get three new emails, with Android, I just see that I have three new emails all grouped together. With iOS I can see at least some of the context. Same with Tweets. The size of the alerts in this tray also isn’t uniform in Android, so Facebook alerts seem more important with their huge logo.

I do like the ability to “clear all” in Android’s notification tray though. The iOS micro clear button remains a joke that badly needs to be fixed.

When it comes to web browsers, arguably the most important feature on any of these devices, there is no question that iOS still has a big edge here. I’ve seen arguments on both sides for why one is faster than the other — most recently, data today favors iOS — but just doing a simple use case test, mobile Safari kicks the ass of Google’s don’t-call-it-Chrome mobile web browser across the board. Some pages still refuse to render correctly on Android’s browser. And the ones that do cannot seem to get the simplest feature right: double-tap to zoom. You do it on Android and there’s a good chance you could end up looking at the middle of a random paragraph.

You’ll also still see a bit of lag in ICS when you do seemingly simple things like this. It’s still not as smooth as it should be. For the most part, ICS fixes many of Android’s performance issues, but there are plenty of times that you’ll still see stutters here and there.

And then there are the apps.

To be fair to Google, Ice Cream Sandwich is currently only on the Galaxy Nexus and it still hasn’t even officially launched in the U.S. But there’s a lot of work to do here. One app that I had on my Nexus S constantly crashes now on the Galaxy Nexus. And rather than quietly closing in the background, I get a nice big Windows-style pop-up that it has stopped running. Many other apps look fairly bad on the larger screen simply because they’re not optimized for it — again, something a wider release of ICS will hopefully fix.

The main problem I have with Android apps on the Galaxy Nexus/ICS remains the ones that are also available on iOS. When the apps exist on both platforms, it’s easy to compare them and the iOS version almost always wins — and often by a landslide. Take the latest version of Twitter, for example. It was just updated to run on both. On iOS it’s smooth, on ICS, there is noticeable stutter when scrolling. It’s much worse on Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself — no big deal, only the biggest app on both platforms.

The reason for the app differences between the two platforms remains a hot topic of debate. Again, all I know is what I see: app to app, iOS still easily beats Android in most cases. One counter-example, which I talked about on stage at LeWeb last week, is SoundTracking. I actually think their app is better on Android. But that has less to do with performance, and more to do with the fact that it can access hooks that iOS doesn’t offer, like background Spotify integration. Android developers should focus more on these benefits of Android and less on making their apps exact ports of their iOS ones. Something always seems to get lost in translation — often badly lost.

Now it just sounds like I’m focusing on the negative. It’s important to emphasize the fact that the Galaxy Nexus is without a doubt the best phone I’ve ever used that’s not an iPhone. And there is no question that it does certain things better than an iPhone — namely all of the Google apps and any third-party background/OS integration beyond Twitter, which is now baked into iOS 5. Google has also managed to just about match Apple in app quantity. This is all good — competition is good.

The next step that Google needs to take (or to help third party developers take) involves around app quality. Put simply: they need to create better tools for developers to use in order to take advantage of the strengths ICS offers. This won’t happen in 6 months, but it can happen if Google works at it.

After that, it’s the intangibles where iOS holds the huge advantage. And just like in sports, it’s not clear how well you can “teach” those. At some point, Google may simply have to acknowledge that iOS looks and feels better than Android because Apple’s entire fabric is woven with design, tight integration, and attention to detail. Google’s strengths are elsewhere; they should embrace that.

Google has done some very nice work here. Both the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich are a new pinnacle of the Android platform. But in the end, it still comes down to something very simple: which device do I want to use day-to-day? Which phone do I reach for when I’m not doing a review? It’s still the iPhone. Without question.

Keep at it, Google.

Looks like Nokia executives are increasingly picking up on a specific kind of skill honed by Microsoft execs over the past few years: saying something stupid about their competitors that is undoubtedly coming back to bite them in the ass at some point. Straight from the foot in mouth department: in an exclusive interview with Pocket-lint, Niels Munksgaard, Director of Portfolio, Product Marketing & Sales at Nokia Entertainment says iPhone and Android devices no longer appeal to younger crowds:

What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone,” he said. “Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security. So we do increasing see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows Phone platform.”

Now, I like Nokia’s Lumia 800, which runs Windows Phone Mango, a heck of a lot (more on that later). But why this executive felt the need to scoff the iPhone and Android as a whole, is beyond me.

Yes, Windows Phone looks and feels different, but not everyone agrees that it’s better. The reality is Nokia has everything to prove betting the smartphone farm on Microsoft, and a lot to lose.

Throwing around statements that today’s youths are fed up with the iPhone because “everyone has it” – what does that even mean? As the proverb goes: speech is silver, silence is golden.

(The awesome facepalm image above = courtesy of Flickr user MithrandirAgain)