It’s no <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/who_uses_pinterest.php">Pinterest</a>, but according to data from now Google-owned Admob, iPhone users were split pretty evenly along gender lines in February of 2010, with women accounting for 43% of iPhone owners. As for Android, that number was at 27% - less than a third. In 2011, a<a href="http://blog.hunch.com/?p=51781"> survey</a> of 15,818 Hunch users found that iOS users are more likely to be female, while Android users still trend male. But why?

Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:<p>

Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.

[Sprint CEO Dan] Hesse pointed shareholders to other benefits of the iPhone, noting that the device helped provide protection against litigation over Google Inc.’s Android operating software and allowed it to trim a costly loyalty program put in place to prevent customers from leaving for other carriers offering the device. Sprint activated 3.3m iPhones over the past two quarters, compared with 11.9m at AT&T Inc. and 7.5m at Verizon Wireless.</p><p>

“If you have any doubt go look at T-Mobile’s net subscriber numbers,” Hesse told shareholders. T-Mobile USA is the only major carrier without a deal to carry the iPhone and has lost contract customers in 10 straight quarters.

Last November, not long after an airplane landed at Sydney Airport, crew members discovered a passenger with an iPhone that was literally smoking — and it turns out the problem was a bad repair job. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has finally released the results of its investigation — which included initial testing in Australia before the phone was shipped to specialists in the US — and concluded that a stray screw was the cause of the problem. The screw managed to puncture the battery casing, causing the phone to overheat and start smoking.

The Galaxy S III is... well... it's ugly. There's really no other way to put it. But why? Why is it ugly? I don't mean aesthetically, why is it ugly, I mean, "How did something like this ever make it out of Samsung's design studio?" I'll tell you how, it was never in the design studio. This phone design was born down the hall, in a room where the door sign reads "Samsung Legal."</p><p>
It was designed by lawyers.

Mobile ads pay very poorly. In my case, ads didn’t even come close to delivering similar value as the $4.99 paid-app sale — I was lucky to get even $1 of value out of an Instapaper Free user. What I’ve heard from other developers and other ad networks suggests that this is pretty close to the industry average.</p><p>

I decided to yield the free market to my competitors and discontinue Instapaper Free over a year ago, and my sales have remained healthy. (In fact, they’ve increased, but it’s difficult to know whether that was the cause.)…</p><p>

This definitely isn’t an Android problem: it’s a user problem. Maybe a significantly larger percentage of Android users insist on free apps than iOS users (it certainly seems that way). But both platforms have much larger demand for free apps than paid apps.

Based on the Q1 financial reports from Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt estimates that Apple had 59% of the U.S. smartphone market from the country’s top three carriers in the quarter. That was up from 36% a year ago, although down a bit from 63% in the December quarter, a period in which Apple launched the iPhone 4S.</p><p>

McCourt writes that non-iPhone smartphone sell-through appeared to drop 38% year-over-year, while iPhone sell-through grew 55%.

Apple’s iPhone continues to sell well at Verizon, though not quite as well as last quarter. Reporting first-quarter earnings largely in line with expectations this morning, Verizon said it sold 6.3m smartphones. Of those, 3.2m were iPhones.

Canada’s love affair with the BlackBerry is waning.

Research In Motion has been ousted from the top spot for smartphone shipments in its home market for the first time, trailing Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, shipped 2.08m BlackBerrys last year in Canada, compared with 2.85m units for Apple, data compiled by IDC and Bloomberg show. In 2010, the BlackBerry topped the iPhone by half a million, and in 2008, the year after the iPhone’s debut, RIM outsold Apple by almost five to one.

In an effort to make touchscreens less static, Apple has proposed that future iPhones and iPads could feature actuators that would provide haptic feedback to users, and also include sensors that would measure the force at which a user touches the screen.

The concept was unveiled this week in a <a href="http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2012/0068957.html">patent application</a> discovered by <em>AppleInsider</em> entitled "Touch-Based User Interface with Haptic Feedback." The use of actuators underneath a touchscreen could allow users to actually feel elements on the screen, such as buttons or controls.

a new comparison was made ​​by Android Central. The site wanted to know the performance of Google Chrome on Android (currently in beta) from the browser Safari mobile. As shown in the video, the iPhone 4S and Safari are doing pretty good but the Galaxy Nexus wins many times over its competitor.

Apple now has the top-selling cellphone of any kind in Japan, IDC Japan determined late Thursday. The iPhone 4S launch helped Apple claim 26.6% of all cellphone shipments in the country this fall. It may have been the first non-Japanese company to top local ranks, ending a longstanding emphasis on local makers.
The Fujitsu-Toshiba alliance was next closest at 18.3% courtesy of its Arrows smartphones, while Sharp (15.7%), Kyocera (9.8), and Panasonic (8.8%) were next. Year-long, the spike was enough to give Apple 14.2% of the country's cellphone sales. Sharp (20.1%) and Fujitsu-Toshiba (18.8%) were still larger, but it did see Apple eclipse Panasonic (10%) and Kyocera (9.7%).

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is planning to start the process of ditching Research in Motion’s signature BlackBerry wireless phone largely in favor of the iPhone, the agency’s top tech official told POLITICO.

“We’re going to delete the BlackBerry from the mix,” Rick Holgate, ATF’s chief information officer, said in an interview.

That move — which includes swapping out about 3,800 BlackBerrys — should be complete in “probably no more than a year,” he said. More than 60% of the replacement devices are initially slated to be iPhones.

The following diagram shows my estimates for this cost structure for the fourth quarter given both bill of materials estimates and the other parts of the cost of goods sold and operational expenses and even ancillary sources of revenue.

We spoke to an Apple representative who confirmed that the settlement is for those customers who chose not to take a free case or return their phone back in 2010. It looks like holding out didn't get you much more than the option to take $15 cash instead.

So why do carriers insist on selling the iPhone? Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all declined to comment directly on that question for this article, but the companies have said in the past that having the iPhone is a major selling point for their brands.

In an interview with CNNMoney in October, just after Sprint announced it would begin selling the iPhone, Sprint CEO Hesse said the No. 1 reason why customers had left Sprint prior to October was because it had no iPhone.

"Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone," the Houston, Texas-based firm told employees in an internal newsletter this month.

Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

For some context, Apple sold 72m iPhones in its fiscal 2011, a staggering number that required all the muscle of the world's most valuable technology company, as well as a network of Asian factories pumping out the devices at a breakneck pace. The sales came from more than 100 countries.

Now Chinese consumers may want to buy nearly that many iPhones all by themselves.

That may well happen, says Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, who in a note to investors guessed that Apple may soon be selling 57m iPhones annually in China, capturing 60% of the projected market for smartphone buyers there. That would be a sixfold increase from the 10m iPhones Chinese consumers bought in 2011.

"If I’m right [that it's because chipsets and batteries for LTE need to be bigger], we will start seeing smaller LTE Android handset sets a year or so from now, and the tech press will collectively forget the 'bigger is inherently better' mindset that pervades phone reviews today."