Apple to ship 30.3 million iPhones this quarter… but only half the expected volume of Android devices

According to investor estimates Apple are expected to ship 30 million iPhones this quarter. That sounds impressive, but to put this in perspective in relation to Android device activations, the current numbers from Google say as of mid December, they’re seeing 700,000 new Android device activations A DAY.

That means in a quarter, there’s more than 63 million new Android devices activated. Now that’s impressive.

Apple lawsuit against HTC over linkable phone numbers

This has to be one of the most ridiculous patent infringement lawsuits possibly ever. Apple hold a patent for a feature that turns phone numbers and other recognizable data structures (e.g. addresses) into clickable links that when clicked call the linked phone number. Hmm. That seems kind of obvious nowdays right? Don’t all smartphones do this? I remember seeing this a few years back with the Skype client on Windows too – it would turn all phone numbers in a webpage into clickable links that would call the number using Skype if you clicked the link. My Windows Mobile phone four years or so back did this too.

So Apple has sued HTC over a number of patent infringements (why HTC specifically?) and this is the only one that the court ruled that HTC was infringing. The ruling states HTC has until April next year to remove the feature or HTC phones will be banned from being imported into the US. So, HTC responds and has said they’ve removed the feature already for future Android releases on their phones. Ok, good, end of story, that was easy. That wasn’t very exciting was it? The press are of course having a field day with this one.

Gizmodo: Siri is Apple’s Broken Promise

You would think from Apple’s TV ads for the Siri feature on the iPhone4S that Siri is technology from the future. The reality is though it doesn’t actually work as well as they show in the ads. And most of the time it doesn’t work at all since the processing of the voice recognition occurs server-side and apparently Apple have been having issues keeping the service up and/or available and you get a response something like: ‘I’m sorry, this service is unavailable right now. Please try again later’.

This article in Gizmodo gives the dirty low-down. It’s an interesting step forward, but in reality it’s just not ready for prime time yet.